...Earthling...

“He   saved  the planet.”

It is a phrase I’d like to see 

carved into my tombstone. 

But at my age, and 

with time running out,

the chances that something

massively catastrophic 

   of a celestial nature

transpiring upon my watch is 

   pretty much next to nil.

But if it did…

If by chance some pending doom loomed

at precisely 2:22 tomorrow afternoon,

do I have the skill-set 

to actually save the world?

Would I have had the precise 

doohickey gizmo thing-a-majiggy 

there in my skin-tight leotard

that’s required to counter-tweak 

   the nipple of    annihilation?

Do I?

Does my wee noggin possess 

   sufficient intel-quotient

to ponder potentially precipitous

pedantic equations such as      say…

E=mc…    um…

E=mc…   Damn !

I told you I was the 

wrong guy for the job.

Squared!  For as with any 

circular shaped apocalypse;

you need a squared peg hero in that 

   deep   rabbit    hole.

Ah, the connection 

between rabbits and

total world      annihilation?

Well if you knew your 

intergalactic space history,

you would be aware 

that the greatest threat

we Earthlings    

ever encountered

came from the 

dark sinister hands of

‘Commander X-2’.

What?    

No drop to your knees in a 

catatonic spasm of abject terror?

Surely you know the name.

Surely you are aware that

there have been moments in 

the space-time continuum when 

   earth blocked the view

   of Venus   as seen from Mars.

Surely you’re aware of the

‘Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator’.

Seriously    sinister stuff     indeed.

Commander X-2 zipped around upon

an ominous spaceship nicknamed

   ‘The Martian Maggot’.

And he could fry your brain 

at a moment’s notice

with a disintegrator gun  

cuz this dude was prone 

to getting a  tad  angry.

Very, very tad angry.

And so yes, he had this heinous plot.

In the name of

greater interplanetary vista,

he would vaporize our beloved earth.

And just who was it that

stepped in at the last second

to avert total world obliteration?

NASA?     No.

The United Nations?     No.

The Uncanny X-Men?      No.

Other comic book characters such as

the Fantastic Four,

   Batman & Robin,

Johnny Quest or

    George W. Bush?

Come on now. 

Let’s stay serious.

It was of course  a rabbit.

Commander X-2,

aka ‘Marvin The Martian’

brought to his knees by 

some aerial eared bunny

   with the first name of ‘Bugs’.

And the year the world 

almost came to end?   

1948.   Oh and on a

get-high-note, that is also

the first year it was documented

that an Earthling,  aka   ‘Bugs Bunny’,

traveled into space and

encountered the most extraterrestrial 

   Commander X-2.

Well yes, Commander X-2

and his faithful companion “K-9”.

“K…9”       Canine.

Yep, his little Martian buddy 

was a dog.

1948 and you had mice in the moon,

   cows over the moon,

rabbits in space

   and dogs on Mars.

Correction.

I have just been informed 

that in actuality

these were all

nothing more than cartoons, 

fairy tales  and ex-presidents 

so     they don’t   really  count.

The first trueEarthling in outer space?

November third, 1957,

a female Soviet Cosmonaut 

by the name of   ‘Laika’.

She was a bitch.     A canine.

Yes, a small stray mongrel dog who 

  we officially came to know of    as  ‘Laika’

  but that was in truth not her real name.

No, the name she answered to was ‘Kudryavka’.

‘Kudryavka’:  ‘Little  Curly-Haired One’.

Four days after the Soviets 

launched her into space,

the thermal control system malfunctioned 

and the little curly-haired one 

died of heat-stress exhaustion.

And there in 1958, 

the Sputnik 2 carrying Laika

fell back to the Earth 

and burnt up 

upon re-entry.

She: the first Earthling to 

light up our dark night’s sky.

And there the following morning

those few extra particles 

of atmospheric dust

brought the slightest 

nuance of color

to an otherwise 

ordinary sunrise.

Laika.   

Did her sacrifice save the planet?

Future historians will 

likely offer arguments 

that she did,

and yet what was proven but

just how shallow the well 

of our bleak human compassion?

No, instead of the 

Earthling named Laika,

I find myself dwelling on 

the    other dog.

The one named ‘Kudryavka’.

The one who licked the hand

   of he who strapped her 

       into the capsule’s harness.

‘Kudryavka’.

Little   Curly-Haired One. 

Little starry-eyed one. 

As they looked through the hatch

upon its moment of closing, did 

anyone notice 

the wag of your tail?

©09 Jack Hubbell

 ...Mine Vine Mind...

A broken trellis. 

A sagging arbor. 

A bed of flowers 

   obliterated. 

My mind... 

   Yes. 

My mind is like a 

   ruined garden. 

Oh, it was beautiful once. 

Am I allowed to say that? 

Is that vain? 

Well, only if I portrayed it as 

   still beautiful, 

and as I’ve just told you, 

it most certainly 

is not. 

No matter. 

I’d still like to invite you in. 

Take you for a stroll. 

Having said that, 

our stroll won’t be an easy one. 

No. I now find orientation difficult. 

Quite lacking in direction, find it 

hard to trace a path that leads to 

concise and noteworthy mental locales. 

Yes, the terrain has become somewhat obtuse. 

Alas, but how the milkweed and 

kudzu have taken over. 

Now ever-clinging vines 

choke away thoughts and 

vast overgrowth obscures 

self-realization.

Indeed, I’m…  I’m… 

   I am 

   homogenized. 

There in my brain, 

a mass of woven weed prevails. 

And all such ruminations sprout tendrils. 

Tenacious roots which 

ease their way through 

soggy folds of cortex, 

and there penetrate 

soft and decadent cerebella. 

There… just over there, 

you would have once encountered 

a multitude of rose resplendent flora. 

Heavy, ripe and dripping sanguine, 

it draws you in and there beneath…

     something to repel; 

something to make you wary. 

Oh yes. 

Yes, at one time, 

I was contradiction personified. 

And now, as you pass your hands through 

the dense blanket of overgrowth, 

you come to 

wince and recoil as you encounter the 

pained memory of my 

  former self, 

for here now, 

only thorns remain.  

Rosebuds here are withered 

and forgotten. 

All this aromatic delight 

has fallen to garden floor to become 

one with the humus of fetid earth. 

Those that remain, 

remain dormant and un-bloomed. 

Their verdant green no different 

than all that leprous ivy 

and sumac. 

Yes, my mind is a 

hateful ugly place 

and knowing this, 

I imagine you wonder why 

I’ve have invited you in. 

But here… wait… 

Before you turn and go, 

indulge me this final moment, 

for I’ve one last thing to show you. 

Assuming we can navigate past 

all those stinging nettles, 

you’ll find it there, 

just at the back of my garden. 

It’s there… Just there. 

        Look. 

Thiswas once my garden shed. 

Inside you’ll find a rake; a hoe; 

    a scythe; a shovel. 

These and that wheelbarrow, 

    ill kept and rusted.  

And again, why? 

Why do I show you this? 

Well, you see, 

I have this favor to ask of you. 

Bearing in mind the inherent 

   thistle in my thought, you 

  havemade it this far. 

You’ve made it all the way to my shed 

and having seen my 

   fall from Eden, 

I would ask of you… 

   You who might soil your hands 

   for me…

Am I truly ruined, or 

in the slightest way, 

somehow worthy of  

your gracious and 

   most merciful 

   redemption?  

©06 Jack Hubbell

  ...That’s Entertainment...

Ogg the Flatulent 

sets his bushy beard aflame 

and those of us enthralled Neanderthal 

gathered about the blazing cave fire 

express our most ardent appreciation 

by bouncing applause stones off 

our bruised and blemished foreheads. 

Please note that as soon as we troglodytes 

came to grasp the significant condition 

known of as     concussion, 

we abruptly came to discard 

said customary stones 

and the concept of applause 

was redefined as the spastic act 

of two hands clashed together. 

Though the burning beard parlor trick 

proved very popular, it in truth 

failed to last until the eerie advent 

of rooms called “parlors”. 

The hilarity of scar tissue aside, 

around one millennium later, 

our desire for amusement evolved 

from singed facial follicles 

to the inevitable presence 

of them who we’d call mimes.  

Indeed, as our homo sapient 

intellect came to evolve, 

self-inflicted pain to entertain waned 

and we’d soon require grown men 

acting as if they’re robots 

to put us all a titter o’ 

transistorized titillation. 

Willing suspension of disbelief, 

said mime would have us except 

the motion notion of he 

as a mechanized man. 

Oh, and doing so, 

we in mass are somehow entertained. 

So much so that upon 

the wanton climax of his act, 

we will pull coin from purse 

and place it in his waiting hat. 

He… 

He is a street busker and his 

current area o’ raucous 

resides within London’s Covent Garden. 

Oh, and for every busker, a punter, 

and this one particular busk 

has amassed a resounding thousand. 

He has this shtick; 

would have us believe he’s 

some sort of unfeeling automaton. 

This no more than an act 

(though his wife doth beg to differ). 

To be an animated automaton… 

That.     That.     That! 

That would be his sizzle shtick! 

He of unhappy apparatus status, 

absent bliss o’ beatitude, 

would bring smiles unto the masses 

whilst void thereon his own. 

He would not, could not smile. 

Could not permit the experience 

   of joy unto himself, 

but would do his utmost 

   to bring it to another.

And so… 

And so, synergic motor 

emotive interloper that he is, 

he passes into the crowd, 

selects a random woman, 

and brings her to the fore. 

And though shy

she swiftly submits 

to synergic scintillation. 

Showtime’s sure allure as it were, 

and servos whir, 

   and rotors stir, 

      and robots putter and purr. 

Our mechanized mime 

moves his demur maiden to 

the middle of the mall where she 

turns to face a sea of smiles. 

Men, women, and children 

expectant to be entertained. 

Lo but what can she do?

What talent doth she possess 

which will mesmerize the masses? 

And here she looks out to note 

that every third or fourth smile 

has a camera plastered above it. 

A quarter thousand lenses 

capturing film and video, 

placing her pending performance 

full-frontal their holiday memories. 

The mime has her strike a fashion pose 

and the circled spectators chime 

with a scattering of churlish chuckles. 

This her first time on stage 

and so soon a boon critique. 

Surely… 

Surely, she possessed some 

other significant attribute 

which might arouse the myopic masses. 

And here the enigmatic mime 

motions for our immaculate maiden 

to raise her arms above her head. 

Having done so, he 

catatonic robotics to her rear, 

reaches down, grabs the hem of 

her thick woolen sweater 

and slowly begins to pull it up. 

This mime held hard assumptions. 

That in absence of a divine god, 

man is surely incapable of morality. 

That the life of any one man, 

no matter how despicable, 

holds more inherent value 

than that of a dog. 

That his penis

was larger than average. 

 That he was currently pulling up 

a heavy-knit sweater and not 

the clinging blouse beneath. 

And here this particular sweater and blouse 

come to pass her armpit level and 

proceeds to cover the maiden’s face 

when those thousand amassed spectators 

begin to cheer as one.

Indeed at this precise moment, 

he as a street-busking mime 

is garnering the greatest applause 

and aroused audience boffola

that his slick robotic shtick 

will ever have achieved. 

And all he has done is 

pull a cumbersome sweater 

up over a woman’s face. 

What? What? 

What could possibly make 

this one particular stunt so special? 

He looks out into the gathered crowd 

to see the most animated 

of hysterical spectators to be 

an assortment of small boys. 

Boys whose mothers are 

frantically attempting to 

turn tantalized faces askew. 

And our mechanized mime 

of deadpan dour 

brings his face down and around 

to behold a perky pair 

of naked breasts. 

Whoa but such a site to behold 

that the mime does a 

sparky spit-take 

and turns his flushed face 

back and about 

to the roar of the 

rollicking crowd. 

And there… 

There to my utter wonder, 

I come to discern 

that rote-rigid robots 

can actually manage to smile. 

Ó2019 Jack David Hubbell