The Man on the Moon

People are working on those things.

No they’re not. Some people might be. A few idealists with no money who get no thanks. Meanwhile the world thinks it is something great if they can have non-stick frying pans and more game shows on telly.

There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just the way the world is.

You’re too right it’s the way the world is and an unjust and cruel way it is too. People live on the streets. They die on the streets. People get AIDS and Hepatitis. They starve to death or are slowly killing themselves with alcohol and drugs.

People kill themselves with alcohol and drugs because they want to. They choose to do it.

No they don’t! They live in a rotten world where people think only of money and status so they take drugs and drink to give themselves some human feelings after being dehumanised by the industrial system that thinks more of putting people on the moon than it does of the milk of human kindness or of caring for the dying, the fatherless and the exploited.

People die like that because they’re losers. The weak have to go to the wall so that the fittest survive.

Oh! Yes! That makes you a survivor does it? Pasty face! You’ve got acne, your eyes are red from staring into a computer screen or into a television. You’ve got a beer belly at the age of twenty five and you reckon you’re fit? No wonder some people prefer to be winos and escape the rat race and the machine into a bottle.

Better than being a bleeding heart. There’s plenty of agencies out there for the likes of them.

Let them help them. If they want help that is. Though why bother I would like to know.

Because they’re human that’s why. Because they are people, that’s why. They might even be the sensible ones who drop out rather than let the system squash and mould them and dehumanise them. They might drop out and clutch to themselves just dirty rags but at least they are the rags of their humanity rather than living in the tin boxes of the machine society which is no society.

What has all this got to do with a man on the moon? That’s what the argument was all about, not your anti-rational meanderings and tear jerking sob stories. Let the down and outs stay down for all I care, the sooner they’re out the better.

Even that might be better than treading the dead dust of a dead satellite and living in a steel tube, eating out of a tube, drinking out of a tube, breathing by machine, thinking by machine, talking by machine. A great step for mankind? Don’t make me weep. There was nothing human in it. It was all done by machine. Long live the machine, down with humanity, up with technology and lots more of the same sort of thing.

FLYING MEN TO MARS

They are flying men to Mars,
I cannot tell why. In rocket ships,
No matter what it costs,
To go to Mars in rocket ships.

A great achievement, going to Mars,
In rocket ships, to live in a giant,
Bubble, climate controlled,
Technologically, artificially.

You cannot walk on Mars,
Nor admire its hills where
The wind blows in your hair.
There is no wind on Mars.

The canals on Mars,
Are signs of nothing
Really very much. Only
Martian dust and rock.

The desert that is Mars,
Is barren, lifeless, there is no life on Mars.
So, in our bubble, we make a climate,
As much like earth as possible.

I do not want to live on Mars,
It is a dull, drear, desert.
I do not want to live on Mars, in a bubble.
I want to live where I can feel the wind and the rain.

I do not want to live on Mars.
It is foreign, alien, dead.
And I was made for earth, with a
Sun that shines upon my face.