The Warpland

Heghlu’meh QaQ jajvam
     For Gene Roddenberry

I. It’s Dead, Jim

5928.5 is the cruelest stardate, breeding
Bracken’s World out of the airwaves, mixing
Westerns and cop shows, stirring
Ironside with Nielson ratings.
Winter kept me enthralled, covering
The Beta Quadrant in Klingons and Romulans,
Space battles with phasers and photon torpedoes.
Summer surprised me, coming home from high school
To a shower of reruns; I pulled weeds,
And rode a riding lawnmower,
And read Heinlein, and ate TV dinners
And thought of Christmas, our aluminum tree
Colored red, yellow, green, and blue by rotating lights
Behind the lava lamp, dad’s ashtray, and cigarette
Lighter shaped like a knight in armor
I watched Kirk, Spock, and Bones
End war and defeat bigotry in fifty minutes
Plus commercials on the big console TV.
Peace, freedom, justice, equality,
Civilization, the quest for knowledge
 
Who were the sponsors, what content grew
Out of this cultural wasteland? I Dream of Jeannie,
Gomer Pyle, Dragnet, and Adam 12.
A heap of sweaty tropes, where dollars rule,
And brain-dead scripts provoke no thought
But “silent-majority” preconceptions.
You placed a lilac in a guardsman’s rifle;
They called you Kent State Lilac Girl.
—In return, the national guard placed bullets
In your chest and stomach. Despite four dead,
The governor dined on steak, rare and bloody.
 
The Keeper of Talos IV, head big as a pumpkin,
Veins pulsing with psychic power
Distracted America with fantasies
While its sons died unnoticed in ‘Nam,
Like victims of simulated attacks on Eminiar VII.
Who wouldn’t prefer saving a sultry blonde
From a fur-clad barbarian by an Arabian Nights castle
Or feasting by a pool with a green-skinned dancer
To a gas crisis, stagflation, and wars of ego?
Who wouldn’t prefer The Love Boat, Columbo,
All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons,
To ideals betrayed and victories squandered?
 
(Those are flowers in the sky. Look!)
Here is the Commodore,
A door impervious to phasers,
The lady bent and misshapen.
Now young and beautiful.
A refuge for a hero crippled by radiation
Locked in a wheelchair unable to speak.
Here he can be young and vital again.
 
Iconic Bridge,
Like a TV viewer, the captain sits
In an easy chair watching the screen.
Helmsman and navigator push buttons
Flip rocker switches, and read analog dials.
Redshirts, Blueshirts circle stakeholders
The automatic door whispers, “whoosh.”
No one wears seatbelts in the twenty-third century!

II. Easter on Vulcan

There was AIDS and Reagan
And Star Trek, the Motion Picture
One hundred thirty-six minutes of self-congratulation
While chasing an interstellar ice cream cone.
We needed a story. We needed Ricardo Montalban’s
Puka beads and bare chest. We needed
A worm tunneled Chekhov’s impacted ear wax
Persuading him to trade up from a Reliant K
To a Chrysler Cordoba’s fine, Corinthian leather.
“We say Córdoba, not Cordóba.”
Spock died but rose again on the third day
As did the Enterprise NCC-1701-A, Easter bunnies,
Dyed eggs on orange sands of Planet Vulcan.
 
That chair I sat in at the card table used for a desk
Pencil smudging doctoral dreams, Q values,
Stokes’ theorem, Clebsch-Gordon coefficients
My mind drained, wrung out, I escaped to
Red uniforms over white turtlenecks,
LEDs, cathode ray tubes, Lissajous figures
In blue and green on black screens,
Thunder speaking amid pink and purple swaths
And this interstellar ice cream cone, not strawberry
Not pistachio but humpback whale
With a topping of Armageddon
Time travel played for laughs
As did El Capitan and horseback charges
Klingons, shoulder pads, Brezhnev eyebrows,
Patchy beards. Splattered Pepto-Bismol blood
Inside rattletrap, reptile-skin bird of prey,
Bald eye patch general with Hare Kishna ponytail
Show trial, sabertoothed guard dog, and plot foiled
We thought the Cold War over until
Klingon warbirds devastated Kyiv.
 
Rephase the Schrodinger kitty litter, he says,
As if I already hadn’t spent eight hours
Adjusting the gravimetric deflectors
And rebalancing the neutron coils
ENSIGN ZORAX, REPORT TO ENGINEERING
You’re lucky he lets you do anything
When I asked how I could help
My commander told me to bring him a cup of coffee
I wanted to spit in it.
ENSIGN ZORAX, REPORT TO ENGINEERING
If you ever want to get promoted, you have to make
The bridge crew notice you.
Good luck with that. I spent twelve shifts polishing
Fresnel integrals and sorting neutrino diodes
But he took all the credit during inspection.
Face it, we’re stuck on the lower decks forever.
ENSIGN ZORAX, REPORT TO ENGINEERING
Well, at least we have Andorian vodka. Want another?
No, I’m pulling a graveyard.
ENSIGN ZORAX, REPORT TO ENGINEERING
ENSIGN ZORAX, REPORT TO ENGINEERING
Goonight Ensign. Goonight Ensign.
Ta ta. Goodnight. Goodnight.

III. Utnapishtim Sights Land

Ferris Bueller at the Von Steuben Day Parade
Anton Ego at Ratatouille’s restaurant
Atticus Finch in the courtroom
“Oh Captain! My Captain!” atop the desk
Indigo Montoya’s rapier, Rocky his fists raised
Ripley’s exosuit, Riker’s beard, E.T.’s bicycle
George Bailey at the Christmas feast
 
Who made my brain, my positronic brain?
Head waggle, beep, head waggle beep
Soong made my brain, my positronic brain
 
Arjuna’s chariot, Eddington’ camera,
Kekulé’s dream of snakes,
Captain Ramius on the Penobscot River
 
Where was a worthy opponent to defeat
Among the hundred billion stars whirling
About the galaxy’s core? Cybernetic hive mind,
Digital fire ants, electromechanical killer bees
Mind-control processors, mutant DNA
Implacable, inexorable, they’re coming
 
Emerald City
Under dripping fir and cedar, my apartment
Cantilevered over the parking lot
Challenger, Chernobyl, my failed marriage
Sweat-soaked gi drying
After kote gaeshi and irimi nage
Zafu, zabuton, stir-fried tofu and broccoli
Black bean garlic sauce, brown rice
The grassy aroma of green tea
Orange couch, color TV, plastic stand
 
Musashi on Ganryu Island
Daniel-san’s crane kick
The Yellow Emperor at Zhuolu
Tokugawa Ieyasu at Sekigahara
Eliot watching Next Generation
Gilgamesh his eyes closed

IV. Death by Disinterest

Deep Space Nine, to my dismay,
Forgot the thrill and pace of TNG
For the profit and loss of Quark the Ferengi.
                                   Before the wane of analog TV
Enterprise too. My interest fell and fell
As I moved from Texas barbecue to fish tacos
Sinking in a whirlpool of indifference
                                   Only watched a few
O you who orbit the UHF dial
Consider Voyager, adrift in the Delta Quadrant.

V. Crouching Starship, Hidden Mushroom

Michael Burnham mutinied against Gene’s rules
But rose again on the third day. Motormouth,
Warp drive on shrooms, water bears in space,
Women talking about their feelings
Why Bryan Fuller? Why?
 
As sickness inched closer,
We performed a Harold that last night
Before America locked its doors
To keep the plague out. Latex gloves,
Coffee-filter face masks, 6 AM dash to the grocery,
Canned tomatoes, chicken broth, no eggs
Midnight’s lonely stairwell to the laundry
My monotonous balcony
A million poetry readings online
 
There’s a red door in the mind, timebomb in the blood
Horse inside the walls of Ilium, a surprise son
Shape-shifting Honey-Bunny grinding cigarettes into Titan’s deck
There’s a red door in the mind, timebomb in the blood
There’s a beat for emotion before battle
There’s a beat before the Borg Cube explodes
Spruance at Midway, Schwarzkopf in Kuwait
                  Live long and prosper

Notes:

1.      The opening sentence means, “Today is a good day to die,” in Klingon.
2.      The last episode of the original Star Trek, “Turnabout Intruder,” series gave stardate 5928.5.
3.      Bracken’s World replaced Star Trek TOS in 1969.
4.      Talosians featured in the Star Trek TOS two-part episode, “The Menagerie,” and used their mental powers to snare victims in lifelike illusions.
5.      A day before being gunned down by National Guardsmen at Kent State, Allison Krause placed a lilac in a guardsman’s rifle.
6.      Eminiar VII is the planet in the TOS episode “A Taste of Armageddon.”
7.      Ricardo Montalban, who played Khan, featured in commercials for the Chrysler Cordoba.
8.      Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country paralleled the end of the Cold War in 1991.
9.      In the Star Trek Next Generation episode “Darmok” Captain Picard learns Tamarians speak in metaphors related to legendary events.
10.  Utnapishtim was the Mesopotamian version of Noah and was immortal.
11.  Arthur Eddington’s experiment confirmed Einstein’s general relativity.
12.  Kekulé realized benzene’s structure when he dreamed of snakes eating their tails.
13.  Gilgamesh failed in his quest for immortality because he fell asleep.
14.  Michelle Yeoh starred in both Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Discovery.
15.  Gene Roddenberry did not want interpersonal conflict among Starfleet officers.
16.  As well as writing the wonderful Pushing Daisies, Bryan Fuller wrote for Discovery.
17.  The Harold is a long-form improv game.
18.  Amanda Plummer who starred in season 3 of Picard also starred in Pulp Fiction.