Day Fourteen: "I Shot an Arrow into the Air"

I Shot an Arrow into the Air

Case study on human nature: men
hurl themselves into the sky,
crash on an unknown desert
in space, and immediately begin
to lie and steal and kill, because
there is only so much water, so
many days to not succumb
to a parched-throat death,
and above all else our own
life is what really matters to us.
And of course the contamination
of this ostensibly hermetic
experiment becomes apparent
in the final grotesque punchline,
a diagram written in the sand
by a dying man: telephone poles
and Reno just over the next dune,
an unsuccessful launch into space
and the comparatively tiny thrust
it takes to be our monstrous selves.