Drone of an Old Trombone

The red dust has settled, but the cold keeps me from sleep.

The gravity so light I cannot experience myself. My hand slips straight through my heart.

Alive now only in reminiscence, but spiralling frantically within my DNA, the blue sphere we bolted from and the memories that haunt, and taunt, and strangle, and weave, insidiously, and continually into every unwelcome wispy dawn.

I wish to feel my own weight against another. The heaving heat of love upon the earth.

I wish to see my mother. A grieving heart will stalk across moons for the debt of your birth.

We came as one, but just as the the dried up seas, we evaporate each day, as we lay here together alone.

So far from home. 

The music has ceased. You hear sometimes, the drone of an old trombone, coming from bunk 23-FB, but I’m not sure if it’s their reluctance, or the just the memories.

I smile at the others, and they tip their steel hats to me, it’s almost quite funny, our pale bodies wrapped in soda cans, but it’s long since been a joke, being stuck here with these folk.

As dried up as me, as dried up as the sea. As dead as the sea life when the atmosphere changed.

No one expected that…

Our ‘symbiosis tanks’ were simply plastic seas. Like a young widow brought to her knees, she wailed for earth, and her pain ricocheted throughout our habitat for years.  

The fish died but we are still alive.

Alive, weightless, loveless, and lost. Tired, bored, desperate and shopped.

And though there is no ticket home, my heart sings a song of you. Just to get through the hours.

And at night, when the drone of an old trombone drifts into my bunk, I hum along, my old same song of you.

You exist now only in the memories, but once on the earth,

someplace in time,

you were mine,

and I was yours,

and we ate fresh fish upon the healthy shores.

And we visited our mothers, and we had each other, and we used to look up, as if there were the answers.

Now, I know, the answer was you. You were simply love, and I came too far this time to realise that.