The Rough Beast Goes to Outer Space
“Why don’t we just put everybody in a space outfit or something like that? No. Seriously, I mean–” –Stephen Moore, Trump Economic Task Force Advisor, April 2020
and outer space looks a lot like America from inside the helmet, the glass curving
the sky back inward like “The Star Spangled Banner” playing backwards from cassettes in the Satanic Panics
when people feared daycares-fathers-teachers- coaches-someone blood-ritualing their children.
That collective hysteria like a constellation with no real lines connecting star to star
to oh-say-can-you, yet people kept drawing them, pointing at the sky–
because something has to be to blame for this earth’s devily worms and split-open Barbie heads
and kids with their knees all bloodied from falling or having to kiss the dark lord’s private parts:
sanctum sanctorum of the mythic fears that say trust no one, not scientists, not doctors, not whoever
says they care — any warning fact boomeranging back like the waning moon of reason
thrown so hard it makes the Rough Beast dizzy. Though he’s breathing through a kind of ventilator
built right into his space outfit, its oxygen pack, thirteen layers, and hard upper torso like a puffed-out exoskeleton or a blowfish
with pads instead of spines. And the $12 million price tag still dangling like Minnie Pearl’s hat in Hee-Haw,
cornpone humor and capitalism included in all these kinds of suits they’re building now.
Which, the economist says, we all may need to buy to have a functioning economy, to plug America back
to neon OPEN signs — its own private zero gravity, which is not what this feels like:
these envelopes in pressurized envelopes the Beast can hardly hear inside, though someone’s singing
that our flag was still there, pointing toward the moon– because something has to be the answer
to an Earth so full of bodies airports are doubling as morgues now and doctors are trussed up
in trash bags as shoppers wave big padded hands like that video where Armstrong and Aldrin try to flatten
the flag that keeps whipping back away like a trick birthday candle, as if America’s wish
might not come true after all. Or might keep coming true like the fairytale where the weaver asks
for two heads and four hands to weave faster, but all his speed doesn’t save him from the village
that fears now he’s a demon, which the Rough Beast understands. He’s listened to the stock market
played forward and the speeches declaring we’re winning, and sometimes the stars look all bendable
rushing at his head, and it’s lonely in this suit, and each day the air seems thinner.