Where will you be when the Mothership comes?
When the Mothership comes,
The blazing lights will blot the stars,
And icy golf course mists will swirl at our feet.
The tunnel of lights will reverberate
With the shrill screams
And cacophonous chorus
Of a thousand hellish angels on wheels
When the Mothership comes
When the Mothership comes, Mariachis will play,
And tequila will flow.
Salty glasses
Will sell like hotcakes,
At exorbitant prices,
Across greasy, shaded bars
While a Wall of Voodoo blares
From crackly speakers
In the background,
Almost drowning out
- The Blaring
- - Mariachi
- - - Trumpets.
When the Mothership comes,
Gwyneth Paltrow will be found
[redundant]
To no one's surprise…
Rose Kennedy will snicker from deep in her grave.
And Maynard may finally realize
He stopped being original ten years ago.
The pope will shiver in fear in the darkness,
And his God will be oblivious.
Obliviousness will be almost ubiquitous,
- Same as it ever was.
But David Byrne won't be
On the bridge of the Mothership
When the Mothership comes.
He has other bridges to cross
And crosses to bear
And barely formulated ideas to bridge.
When the Mothership comes
We will all be in our own darkest places
And the hairs on our arms will stand rigid.
We will all feel the pain
Of Frida’s steel-stiff spine.
It will tremble and topple like Jenga.
And I will voice my disdain for Diego.
The stain of our crimes
Will drip down like slime
From the rafters
When the Mothership comes.
When the Mothership comes,
Cowboys will show a stiff upper lip,
Stirring grounds in their coffee,
While loudly asserting,
To whoever will listen,
"I want to be buried
While wearing my boots."
When the Mothership comes,
Portishead may release a fourth album called Forth.
And Keith Carradine will rise from the ashes.
He’ll fly into the sun
While the dead Tsars of Russia
Display satisfaction
With crackers and caviar,
With vodka on ice,
With ribbons and medals
And Imperial decorum
From a lost former age.
And the coroner will yawn with bored overwork.
Never mind that the dead are now walking.
When the Mothership comes,
I will fight for my right to survival,
But it will be much too late.
So I'll go to a nice Sunday Brunch
In Marina Del Rey,
Where I'll pay way too much
For cold eggs
And fresh salt-spray air.
Dogs will chase slimy Frisbees.
BMX bikes will shine in the sun.
Dolphins will catch waves at Venice
And rats will all nest in cradles
When the Mothership comes.
When the Mothership comes,
We'll assert with conviction
That the Mayans were wrong.
We will travel in time to the past.
Eclipses will dominate the future past sky,
Burning our eyes, and slipping our fingers
On mortars and pestles of lesser and greater refinement.
Saffron will cost a king's ransom,
And will smell like Nirvana,
But will taste
Like the dust of the dead.
Teen Spirit will finally be a thing of the past
When the Mothership comes.
Neither Newton nor Einstein will accept what we find
That space-time is liquid and poorly defined,
With soft, fuzzy outlines, and pictograph rocks
From the time when the hatchet
Lopped off the head of the latest messiah
For the price of a can of Jolt cola.
And the Mothership crests the horizon.
Forever blocking the sun…
When the Mothership comes
I will buy my degree from a matchbook.
And the matchbook will flame
Like the fire in the heart and the crotch of a virgin.
I will die by degrees
And will dye my white linens
The deep bluish-purple
Of the burial shrouds
Of the Ancients.
And the Gorgon will untie the Gordian knot
With the patience and knowledge
Of untold millennia.
To the front.
To the back of the bus.
And the bust of poor Caesar will crack
Down the middle,
And will crumble to dust
As Cicero documents Scipio's Dream.
There's a bias to cloth and a bias to mind
And I haven't a clue to the difference.
A dead pig won’t feel
The sympathetic harmonics
As the ground shakes and vibrates
When the Mothership comes.
Wheels within wheels,
But spokes do not speak,
And spokes are not spoken to.
All feeling is broken, and yellow and flat.
To be neither and nor
To my last trembling pore
Is the target;
To imagine a draft from a crypt or a tomb,
To imagine a door and a room without light,
And a powder-blue something
That hides in the full light of day
When the Mothership comes.
When the Mothership comes
I will see my dead father
For the very last time.
He will smile
With his teeth in his hand.
And the cancerous stench
Of his shriveled, maudlin humility
Will be a rose by any other name.
Where will you be when the Mothership comes?
Will you tremble alone in the darkness?
Will you tumble and roll down a long grassy hill,
Laughing and manic,
Disguising the panic you feel?
When the Mothership comes, will you whimper and quake,
Or embrace the face of the pearly unknown?
When the Mothership comes, all the past will be gone.
And the future will shiver, then die.
When the Mothership comes, the flowers will bloom
And a choir of angels will sing.
When the Mothership comes, I’ll get lost in your smile.
I will cradle your head in my arms.
Your breath and your heartbeat
Set the cadence of our final embrace.
I will gaze at your face,
And with infinite patience we'll meld into one
When the Mother ship comes.
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