20150611 (space travel)

Artist's rendition of Burt Rutan's/ Virgin Atlantic Spaceship one--false image: mother ship below would not be visible; flames would long disappeared as they fire only shortly to put the ship on a straight up trajectory.

Before we knew anything about space

It was possible to dream of high-flown travel

We got away with going to the moon

Several times. Now except for romantics

And the uninformed no one seriously suggests

We go back. For the bewildered who’ve signed up

Or God forbid paid for one-way tickets 

To the Red Planet I pray before their feet

Rise to gain the capsule the scales fall

From their eyes and they demand a refund

Aside from the likely decay of weightless 

Muscle and the chance that undetected

Pinhole punctures to their ships or suits

Will drain their rebreathed oxygen hissed

Into the noiseless void unrecoverable

Once they break from earth’s gravity 

In a very short time they escape the protective 

Shadow of the planet’s magnetic field

And lay exposed to the sun’s unrelenting light

Fish in a barrel for unpredictable pulses

Solar flares Coronal Mass Ejections 

Of such power no physical barrier or low energy field

Would ward them away. Aside from disrupting

Electrical power radios computers those rads 

Would instantaneously corrupt practically 

All your DNA. With a wave of a wave 

You’re nuked to sizzle like a strip of bacon

Or just about everything that makes you you

Is set to a new course as many cancers

As one can conceive and many we cannot

I have not even mentioned Gamma Ray Bursts

Because if we ever get hit with one of those

It’s goodbye everyone even people

On the other side of the earth

So I’ll happily settle for sending machines

Where no man has gone before

Let them take pictures and broadcast back

A misnomer those beams are carefully aimed

The adventures recounted in the sci-fi pulps 

I bought at Pilch’s corner deli on Saturdays

When as an altar boy I served a wedding mass

And was tipped by the best man

I concealed in my shirt lest my mom see

The scantily clad space girls on the covers 

And raise a ruckus about my reading filth

That’s what you do with your mass money

Mom you don’t understand these are space stories

We’ll see about space when your father gets home

All the early NASA books lavish with glorious

Color of earth achievable no more. No more

Star travel. It took ten years and incredible

Computing for Rosetta-Philae to get beside 

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko to let

Philae land on that tumbling dumbbell of porous rock

If they’d asked me I wouldn’t have gone

That’s way too damn many National Geographics

To carry along for leisurely reading

I’m happy with Hubble APOD and Rovers on Mars

I have only to look up to know 

Where my next breath is coming from

Though I don’t rely anymore that I’ll always 

Get to take it








c. J.S.Manista, 2015

20150610 (chutzpah)

It takes chutzpah to get out of bed

To speak or write or claim your fair share

Many believe in this pushy-shovey world

If you don’t get there first you’ve no guarantee 

The prize will be enough for you and the laggards

You want to be the runt of the litter struggling

In the scramble to find a teat with any milk left

It’s not like mother doesn’t provide but 

When births outrun breasts what do you expect

If you have to kick to find your space kick hard

An elbow shot to someone’s face hell what

Was his face doing in my way? Competition

Winnows the field and the best survive

The music stops and there’s no chair

We teach it to our young careless of

The lesson’s point. Innocent fun transmits

Dog-eat-dog before they ever go look for work

In sports especially however kind the coach

Second place is First Loser. No one’s fooled

One of my kids got put on a soccer team

That always won. He hardly played 

But felt so much better than the year before

When he scrimmaged every game 

And always lost. That team never got

The pizza parties at season’s end, trophies

Or pictures in the local press

At least at the playground 

Every kid got an award. Blackest cat 

Quickly scribbled on a standard form 

He had something to show mom and 

Bragged to the cat who could care less

School graded us into varying degrees 

Of wheat and chaff. The quickness of your 

Memory or gift for math sank in fast

Repeated class after class until your prowess 

Or your lack was known to all.  Yet in later years 

The slow kid excelled in law school

Another who studied tediously 

Took over chemistry. How did that happen? 

The speech defect kid completed his project and won

At the district. How did that happen? I was the

One marked for success and these others

Took advantage of my hanging at the gate

Until now I can’t keep up. Nobody’s

Beating a path to my door. Got to

Make a little noise or a whole lot more

Just to get them to look. Then if they like

Plaudits will roll in or not. Some will

Some won’t. You can’t please everybody

There’s always posthumous fame only

Scantly better than total disregard

c. J.S.Manista, 2015

20150609 (weight)

My inner child could stand to lose 

Sixty-five pounds. That would put me 

At my early twenties best wearing 

My dark blue three-piece pinstripe

No more explaining the overweight 

My mother taught due to large-bones 

Excusing our family’s massive asses 

Our excess love of comfort food

Our ignorance of good eating.  

In late teens she watched the Depression

Come to life on her street her school her table

You found a nickel on the sidewalk better

Give it to mom than await a walloping

My father’s clan of ten children was worse

At sixteen you got invited to leave

Eldest Tony joined the navy 

Paid for his freedom imprisoned 

The whole war by the Japanese who 

Took the Philippines. His pencil-thin 

Ninety-five pounds came home in ’46

Compared to films of Auschwitz

He looked healthy. My father 

At sixteen took a job manager of a

Corner food store doing everything 

Washing the floor receiving stocking

And for each customer fetching every item 

On their list and gave his wages to his mother  

If ever I pushed food away or asked in disdain

People eat this? I heard again the story 

How the single egg was saved for the father

Who worked. You got a slice of bread 

Smeared with lard and were told to be thankful

Many don’t even have this

Before the clean plate club we heard 

Eyes too big for your stomach? Finish

Starving children in China? No, children

Were still starving in America. For us

The Depression never ended. If somehow

You talked your mom into buying you

A balsa wood model you found your fingers 

Couldn’t build you had wasted two dollars 

A bag of groceries the family wouldn’t have

You cried yourself to sleep that night

Graduating from college I weighed two-twenty 

And had trouble finding a suit. I ended up

With a capacious light green thing I didn’t 

Want but I didn’t like my lumpy body 

Store mirrors made me look at it

This’ll do. Let’s get out of here. One year’s 

Grad school and I weighed one sixty-five

They just knew I was doing drugs. I dropped out

The next fall and built stereo consoles at RCA

Beside rural workers who quit every hunting 

Season and were rehired at its close

At the bottom of the wage scale again

But trained and ready to start over

I looked great at my wedding 

And for a brief while after. Kids, jobs, and 

Striving I lost track of my ever-so-momentarily

Healthy body and ended here having

To weigh, time, and meter so I won’t lose

My sight or a foot or my fingers

When I see others like me 

Obese out of neglect I try to forgive 

Them all including myself 

Life messes you up

c. J.S.Manista, 2015

20150608 (peacetime)

Once in my childhood I would have been two

I remember my mom saying loud the war is over as

She took me to our front porch roughly eight feet

Above the blessed lovely red brick road

Cars passing through didn’t swish silently by

But sounded a buzzy patter as they touched

Every brick. The sky was blue almost cloudless

She said if I listened I could hear the thunder

Grow louder. I had never heard anything that loud

Grasped her skirt and her leg and clung close

Take a look I can see them I could almost hear her shout

But the noise was everything now closer faster

More distinct rasping like chains of firecrackers 

Slithering towards my foot.  Oh, look! 

Look! They’re flying right over! I saw 

A horde of black crosses hurtling above

Huge growling monsters their shadows

Raced up the street the bricks trees and houses 

I couldn’t count but it took a while for the noise to soften

When they had finally disappeared 

My mom walked to the neighbors next door 

With me clinging to her leg and skirt 

Dragging my frightened little body

Like an injured leg across the grass. 

It was a flight a dozen B-24s at 200 feet

Celebrating the end of fighting in Europe.

Giving the public a little something back 

For all their sons war bonds crushed cans 

Collected cloth paper and bacon fat

Recycled into ships tanks explosives

They’d saved up their rations 

To make a cake for a birthday

Gone without gas cancelled a visit 

Bought only what they needed 

The amount allowed when they could buy it.

Except for gas now saved to bring the boys home

The sacrificing was probably done

I learned this all much later

I was still shaking from the intimidating snarl

Of the ominous black monsters

Everyone else was happy as ever

c. J.S.Manista, 2015

20150607 (moods, meds)

The first time we met I told my shrink 

There’s nothing wrong with me a

Stadium full of cheering fans couldn’t cure

I already have a patient with a stadium full

Of cheering fans and he’s no better off

For it than you he answered with aplomb

When he retired years ago I said I’d be OK 

But took the card of his successor that he offered

As I rose to leave. Now except for

The green morning pill and the yellow

Evening capsule to keep me upright

You might never know the mess who

Came home in August of 1964 

From the Dominican novitiate

After four days of constant tears.

They had tested me, an MMPI which was

Clearly not enough to find the flaw

In my well-trained unstable mind

To this day I cannot say why my

Rebellion took that infantile form

Which shames me as I write, reminds

Every future me stands on shaking ground

For most of my senior year I weekly met with 

A religious counselor whoprayed he was adept 

As he tried  to wash the wound 

Daub it with mercurochrome

Apply some gauze and bandaids which 

Enabled me for graduate school 

A dutyless assistantship, enviable award

Had I known what I was doing

But that patch too unravelled to reveal 

A seductive black hole as deep and destructive

As any whirlpool I’d ever imagined drowning in

Bumbling through the next few months I

Met shrink number one and tried talking it out 

Drafted he sent me to shrink number two

For whom I took all sorts of tests I have them still

Did I want to try pills no my father took pills 

Goofballs he said made him fuzzy and sleep

Talking I managed to go on with life

Job, marriage, promotion, and kids. 

These guys knew what buttered their bread 

When it’s time to quit you’ll know, they said

I knew when to come back too

When the ground started shaking

And the black hole left notes in my pockets

Shrink number three was a waste 

But he got me through a year or two

By shrink number four I knew 

Talk alone was no serious help

Prozac, Paxil, Effexor, Wellbutrin 

We’ll have to find what’s just right

Like Little Red Riding Hood I teased

Did talk ever do any lasting good? Can't say

No Rosebud had a scene in my movie 

So with the little green pill in the morning

And the little yellow capsule at night now

When I wander past the sucking black hole

I don’t get vertigo and fall in. But what I pay 

For the safety of step is forever forsake 

The exuberant joys of heaven and earth 

Which from time to time I sorely regret

c. J.S.Manista, 2015