The Ghost Eater
The
Professor's machine did exactly as promised,
hoovering
up ghosts quicker than you could say Jack Rob
but
he never did explain what happened to them
before
he vanished, machine & all,
in
full view of 1,026 citizens of Wichita, Kansas.
Ideas
about the captured spectres abounded:
converted
to energy and used to heat the Prof.'s home,
squeezed
into a superdense ball of trans-uranics,
beamed
into outer space,
sent
back to the Cambrian,
when
Earth was young,
and
the landscape dry as dust.
That
one was right.
Not
much to do in a desert so barren
the
sand gets lonely,
Joe,
and Bill, Eileen, baby “X”, and all, they
floated
around making conversation:
morning
Zebu, good to see you Phyl,
day
after tiresome day as a disembodied spirit,
unable
to interact with matter
no
one to frighten except Petra,
and
she was only pretending,
being
a wight herself.
“Just
let me die!” the only joke,
&
after 14,000 years it wasn't funny any more.
So
they schemed to haunt the Professor,
haunt
him somethin' fierce
from
the very moment of his birth.
But
you know what?
The
ghosts dissipated one by one,
not
a one even made it
to
the conquest of land,
they
changed, somehow, learned to let go,
popped
like soap bubbles, unobserved.
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