Poetry at 2:00 AM

I’ve been reading a bunch of books tonight in preparation for my California History midterm tomorrow. The primary source documents I’m looking over are pretty dry, and the whole thing’s really only palatable because of some pretty well-written backgrounds of each document from my readings’ historians that read like beautiful stories. In the process of doing this, I suddenly felt the need to write something that had nothing to do with what I was doing. I dropped my pencil, picked up my laptop, and started hacking away.

This is what I typed out. I call it “On that fateful day”. I feel like it’s inspired by a Neil Gaiman poem I once read called The Day the Saucers Came By in terms of the fantastical subject matter and departure from form in the end, but I feel like I’m speaking to a bit of a different purpose.

I waited for you, on that fateful day,
and oh the sites I did see.
A ferris wheel,  freed from its moorings,
dangerous enough to be not too boring,
careened wildly from avenues A to C.

Broken free from its stands,
and with white carriages for hands,
it waved cheerfully as it rolled on right past me.

The police followed, tires squealing,
warnings thundering, sirens screaming.
Oh what a thing that you should-could have seen.

I waited for you, on that fateful day,
and oh the sites I did see.
On my park bench, coffee in hand,
I watched the moon, ever grand,
find her voice and argue with the sun ’till nine-thirty.

“If I could, I would drive,
and cross this cold, dark night’s divide,”
said the moon as she wept and did plead.

“But I can’t find my way yet,
because you took my GPS.”
Oh what a thing that you should-could have seen.

I waited for you, on that fateful day,
and oh the sites I did see.
For when I looked past my paper,
I thought I had gone to see my maker,
because Albert Einstein was staring right back at me.

“Look here,” he said firmly,
with a German accent – drunken and surly,
“Sci fi is written by a bunch of loonies.”

“No respect for special relativity,
there’s no sounds in space, or wave particle duality!”
Oh what a thing that you should-could have seen.

I waited for you, on that fateful day,
and oh the sites I had seen.
Long dead physicists, speaking moons,
Waving ferris wheels, bending spoons,
and ferrets who could count in Latin from one to thirteen.

But all of it, while weird,
was not exciting. Or cool. Or nifty.
Or even really that interesting.

Because you weren’t there to see it with me.