Member Poem

The Ghost Eater

The Professor's machine did exactly as promised,
hoovering up ghosts quicker than you could say Jack Rob
but he never did explain what happened to them
before he vanished, machine & all,
in full view of 1,026 citizens of Wichita, Kansas.
Ideas about the captured spectres abounded:
converted to energy and used to heat the Prof.'s home,
squeezed into a superdense ball of trans-uranics,
beamed into outer space,
sent back to the Cambrian,
when Earth was young,
and the landscape dry as dust.

That one was right.

Not much to do in a desert so barren
the sand gets lonely,
Joe, and Bill, Eileen, baby “X”, and all, they
floated around making conversation:
morning Zebu, good to see you Phyl,
day after tiresome day as a disembodied spirit,
unable to interact with matter
no one to frighten except Petra,
and she was only pretending,
being a wight herself.
“Just let me die!” the only joke,
& after 14,000 years it wasn't funny any more.
So they schemed to haunt the Professor,
haunt him somethin' fierce
from the very moment of his birth.

But you know what?
The ghosts dissipated one by one,
not a one even made it
to the conquest of land,
they changed, somehow, learned to let go,
popped like soap bubbles, unobserved.