At 8.45 this morning, the aliens made their
long-secret presence on our planet known.
I would have missed it if Terry hadn't called
to tell me to turn on the TV. Sure enough
the story was on every channel. They hadn't come
for blood, the President assured us, or babies
or virgins as we might have feared from the old
sci-fi flicks. They hadn't even come for oil. They
came for ink instead. Within moments of the
announcement pens all over the world began
drying up, printers were laying sheets of ghostly
paragraphs in paper trays. So this will be my last
poem. Forget the barroom boasts, the grad school
solemnity. There's no way I'm really going to
start writing this stuff in blood. Or pencil.
Or crayon, either, for that matter.
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