There came a time, at last, for the race of man
To pack itself into a huge tin can
And, puffing plasma, set out for the stars.
With a sidelong glance at Mars they fled
From off their planet, which they'd made dead.
For a million years they'd picnicked on those grounds,
Then left them, bleak with blacks and browns
Of ragged rocks and rotting wrecks of trees and stinks
And oozing slimes and burning fogs smoke out of chinks.
Off to find another place on which to plant the human race.
Three quarters of a century it took to far Centaurus.
A multitude of winking beer cans marked their daily trail,
And stubbed out butts and bottles; a cracked recording
Of the Anvil Chorus. They'd scribbled on the firmament
With several hundred million miles of toilet paper
In jagged lines across their spoor of ion vapour,
And tastefully distributed along their run
Were gobs of dog and cat shit by the ton.
Four hundred trillion cockroach corpses
Tumbled in a cometary tail
To advertise man's glory
In departure from his sun.
On planet four, Centaurus Alpha, lived a race of crystals.
Pristine, cubic, pyramid, cylindrical, prismatic,
Airborne, groundbased, and aquatic. How they shone
And twinkled in the sun as they rolled across the stones
Of their tesselated highways, threaded
'Round their crystal flowers
Reflecting intersecting rays of light
Connecting glassy towers.
Catching, tossing, juggling light beams just for fun --
But then...their huge reflectors duly noted,
Since they had been vacuum coated,
The approaching garbage complex fleeing from Earth's sun.
Facets flashed with fright and horror
At this disgusting Earth explorer
Come to desecrate their purity,
Violate their clarity, security,
Rain detritus down on everyone.
So, with haste and hyperspacial radio
The crystals sent a frantic call to Scorpio,
To the Cosmic Cleaner Consultation Center
Complaining of the coming filth fomenter.
"Earth," they screamed, "has done a flit.
And now is wildly flinging shit.
Frankly, we are in a snit.
By your oath, you must stop it!"
And the Center answered, "Cool it kid,
We'll make it quit."
In Scorpio there is a place between the stars,
Stuck out in space, a place with bars
Which tight entombs a monster out of death and doom.
When the center acted on the call to banish
Earth's star ship and make it vanish,
It initiated mechanisms to enforce the ostracism
By directing cataclysm of the very fabric
Of the geodesic of its trace.
One parsec tall colossal doors on this place
Parted to divide and free the thing they'd kept inside.
It took six months to open wide at speeds FTL
And wake the beast that snoozed inside this convoluted shell.
The Janitaur pricked up its ears,
Wiped sleep from off its sensors,
It yawned a yawn and belched a belch
That squelched three nearby suns
And turned then into meteors
The size of hot cross buns.
"Janitaur," the Center spoke to now evoke
An action in this thing it woke,
"You are assigned to launch yourself
And search and find, eliminate
A new distress. Sector five, quadrant eight
Is the place you must address.
A steel ship out of Sol contains
All that now remains of humanity.
And with pandemic, systematic
Quite erratic antisanity
They've trashed their Earth, despised its worth,
And now they've quit their native sun
To litter up another one.
So..sic 'em baby, bite their tails
And knock their blocks right off the rails!"
At this command, the Janitaur unrolled its lacy wings
Which spanned out to a million miles, composed of cosmic strings.
Its flashing eyes - two neutron stars,
Pulsed out with spinning beams
With evil glances, left and right, from out of horrid dreams.
Grinning wide gravitic tide, its mouth a large black hole,
Each wicked tooth, bereft of ruth, a pointed monopole.
On winds of stellar fields it soared in hyperspacial mode
And gathered speed in looping glides and gyrals, so it rode
Swooping down galactic spirals hewing to its plan
To intercept and countervail the garbage can of man.
It gobbled moons like salted nuts
And sailed through stellar clouds
As cosmic dust streamed off its wings
In trailing ragged shrouds.
At sector five, quadrant eight, the Janitaur soon sighted
Where Earth's ship had left its trail
And thoroughly had blighted
The calm sterility of space.
With its black hole, the Janitaur
Swept clean the dirty place.
But this act could not console
The fearful driving force
That held it to its destiny in its destructive role.
At once, the human ship appeared,
The monster twisted, swerved and veered
To watch in fascination
The Earth ship unfailingly perform its aberration.
Spewing out with gobbets, with gigatons of garbage:
Apple cores and orange peels and leaves of rotten cabbage,
Worn out scraps of rubber heels,
Corroded chunks of rusty steels,
Dented trays from TV meals
And mashed up cars with wiggly wheels.
It flapped its wings and moved in close.
So much garbage made it savage,
Lachrymose and bellicose.
Confused, bemused, enthused by so much mess
It all induced internal stress.
It curled, it twirled, it whirled, became delirious,
And swooped in flopping manic arcs
Exploding out in corruscate displays
Initiating strange atom decays.
Bright beams of ions, neutrons, quarks
Flashed and fizzled, squirting sparks.
The edge of its event horizon twitched.
The space around the Janitaur became bewitched
With garbage boundlessly enriched.
It rippled out gravitic tongues
To sweep debris at all degrees
And would have laughed if it had lungs.
But these wild enthusiasms
Convulsed in waves and jerks and spasms
Causing cracks, fissures, chasms
In its black collapsar core.
Into itself it deeply plunged
And was, peculiarly, expunged
From this known universe of time and space.
And so, garbage, all of it,
Dogshit, catshit, mainly bullshit,
As before, and ever more,
Was the savior of the human race.