N.E.O.

N.E.O Near Earth Object A solid body whose orbit lies within the orbit of Mars Moons, asteroids, meteorites And human debris You can see a meteorite almost any night Go out to the desert You might find a piece They are pieces of stars Same as you and me They have travelled through space for thousands of years Perhaps you will get lucky But you will never find a piece of Soyuz Or Sputnik or Apollo 9 They are still out there They are very faint And the pollution in earths atmosphere Washes out their pale light Floating without air, without light Or else - charred on the re-entry They are still out there floating Within the orbit of Mars Look at it this way A river of space, a ribbon of time Like a burial by a bureaucrat Undercover of a cold war risk A cloud of dust, a cloud of rubble Spinning in space on the heels of the Hubble A parallel, or a temporal rip On the belly of the Cosmos Somewhere in a hanger A fossilized finger Stored by the government, hidden from the press Some young top gun's first solo Turned out to be a N.E.O