Wiped Out Again
I wrote a poem about Between Lives Implants a decade ago. I won a prize for it in some online (non-Scn) Hallowe'en competition. Parts of it still bring tears to my eyes, even though I wrote it, and I must have read it a hundred times. Strange. Also, it includes bits straight out of Hubbard's stuff, rather than my personal reality. Anyway:
WIPED OUT AGAIN
"Forget! Forget!" the voices say;
"You have no past before today!"
Particle-beams of colossal power
Hack at me for hour on hour
And slowly, slowly, just like before
This life dims down to blaze no more.
I'd been in a body diseased and no use,
Its parts once sprightly now aching and loose,
And though I did yearn for the fulfilling nights
And the passionate days and the sometime fist-fights
Of my long-ago youth, yet I knew my lot
Was to die and to rot.
Everyone knows when you die, it's done;
You go all stiff and react to no-one.
And maybe your "soul" goes off somewhere:
But it's not you--why the heck should you care?
The end has come, there can be no doubt
And all is black from here on out.
So how come I watched them after I died
From above my corpse? "He can't hear you" they lied.
Some wouldn't look and some would stare,
Yet one small child could see I was there
And for a heart's beat we smiled at each other
Till whack! off her feet she was struck by her mother.
I remembered that smile, that girl I saw;
I'd known her in many a lifetime before.
Once we'd been lovers but eons ago
And ever since then I'd been hoping but no:
Fate, fickle Fate, had other ideas
And life after life lived up to my fears.
One time I'd be eighty and she would be ten;
The next one the both of us ended up men.
Or opposite sides in some trivial war
Would separate us for a lifetime or more
And sometimes a dozen lives went by
Where we never once touched, she and I.
But one always knows when the other's about,
Even though every lifetime we both get wiped out,
To come back again and again and again,
Sometimes as women and sometimes as men;
Yet whatever the body, I know that smile,
For it radiates more than Chernobyl's pile.
Back in the hungry dark of that room
I craved for my body, stark in the gloom
Till the stick-men came and bore it away
To where six-legged mouths could help its decay
And after a while when I'd ceased to care
I was wrenched to your-holy-man-doesn't-know-where.
As a spirit I shrieked in this pitiless place,
With electronic hellfire lancing my face,
And the voices cut through the agony
Which had shredded my will to go on being me:
"Forget what has happened! You must not recall!"
And "Look at your future--it's right on that wall."
Slowly and grayly I peered that way,
Like millions of other poor souls each day.
And now in defeat, limp and numb,
I can only agree what I am become,
And lo and behold it occurs as it seems:
I come back to Earth and a fresh baby screams.
Mass and confusion is all I have got,
Trapped once again in a small body's cot.
I can't even make the damned thing squat,
And I cry in frustration at I'm-not-sure-what;
But wait! See, big sister is smiling at me:
That smile...that smile....
Paul