with Mars at perihelion,
I point my telescope at clouds
that may or may not part,
unlike plush curtains at The Odeon
that never failed to swish and jerk,
to reveal more stars than heaven
after the heraldic lion roared
above my family legend:
Teneo Vestri Locus (Know Your Place)
instead of orange on a stick,
I drink lukewarm thermos tea
and wait for the main feature:
galaxies above my garden shed,
a Milky Way to watch and eat,
a life of disappointment, tinged with bliss
between soft porn and hard astronomy,
square blue moon of laptop screen,
I type a forlorn phrase
into Google: fear of success
and hit ten thousand therapists
who want to sell me self-esteem
one authority, with some disdain,
declares there is no such phobia,
there is only fear of failure,
which is not how it feels, at all:
I do not want to plant
a flag on any planet
I measure light in centuries
to prove how small each world is,
how deluded is each ego
stars appear, like the opening bars
of Pearl & Dean: fifty yards
from this venue, finest Indian cuisine
my boil-in-the-bag tikka
scorches on the kitchen stove
as I squint to bring in focus
the God of War’s twin horses,
Fear and Terror: two dead rocks
traversing an alien, blood-red sky
