No Space for Me

by R.S. Mengert

When I was a boy, I dreamt of being
an astronaut.  I grew up freakishly large
and half blind.  No space for me.
No floating embryonic in the zero – g void
bathed in the silver effervescence
of the starlight.  I must walk the earth
of stone and mud as I do tonight,
bound by gravity and fear.

On nights like this, I should just stay inside and drink,
or read Aquinas by the yellow flicker of electric light,
the hum of a cheap space heater.  He said evil
is nothing more than the absence of good,
just as cold results from lack of heat, darkness
from the lack of light, and that all of human
kind is holy in its nature.
In the frigid early dark, the cobalt sky is fear.  The pockmarked street beneath my stairs is black
and solid, swallowing the light the day has left behind.  I will step down to walk on it, and take
what darkness I can.