Blackout: 8 September 2011 Poem by Ralph Vaughan

The Doctor escapes the Space Rhino Cops,
But then the sucking octogenarian plasmavore –
Here the grid cracks and fractures,
Spindled folded and mutilated
Without so much as a warning flicker,
Zapped afar, under a watery sun
And a too-bright turquoise sky:
Chaos!
Pandemonium!
Massteria!
Panic in the streets!
Someone yells: “Zoot suit riot! ”
It was me; I could not help myself.
But people are running back indoors,
Satisfied, more or less, it’s not the Rapture;
Still – no television, no radio, no (OMG!) internet…
End of the world maybe,
But my date-planner is already marked 12/21/12:
How inconvenient!
Relax, you are not dying, the battery voices tell us;
But when purple twilight fades into indigo night,
How dark are the streets,
How quiet are the houses,
How deep the darkness as we are swallowed by a tsunami of silence;
And inside a candle flickers,
And the dogs rest, their eyes bright,
Their breaths even as they listen
To the Alpha read Byron and Yeats and Tennyson,
Just as humans used to tell them stories
Around the smoky campfires,
The primal fires where magic was worked
And spirits lingered in passing to hear the tales;
When we made our final journey into the night
The silent tombs of the apartment-dwellers rose above us,
Framing a cloudless sky,
And we thought - the stars, how cold, how bright,
We did not know they yet burned in the primeval night.