Originally published in Planet Magazine No. 42 (August 2004).
I dropped lasagna on my sock
Who knows what this could spell
Consequences flip by–
circles of Hell and
melted ice cream trucks
–like the numbers on a deprecated clock
The jolly tinny jingle fades into a distant crash
From a human energy unit broken
down to chaotic fate and imbalance
From orderly threads of space-time woven
the local anachronism propagates
Painting my world with chunks of disarray
until I am irreversibly consumed
Yet an imprint of my former antics remain
promoted to the ranks of the stars
A vast and omnipresent constellation
You can connect my dots
Travelers will use me in their trips
to navigate the harsh bodies
of accumulated water
Without disturbing the carefully coded
wave patterns
Without wasting a drop
of propellant
And I will be revered
not as a person but as a thing–
the only way to earn my wings
of immortality
Eternally confused,
I will emerge deified
My incoherent babbling
taken as divine law
to shape history for eons
as I dwindle into obscurity
The only thing I know for sure
is that my foot-coating garment
will never look the same
And only a star-sent message
of the purest form
could contain the formula
for reversing the stains
of entropy.
Story © 2004 by Sam Kenyon
Illustration © 2004 by Robert Sorensen
