A Spacer’s Heart

A spacer’s heart is never quite her own,
Entangled with the anti-matter drive
It pulses in a throbbing monotone,
Uncertain what it means to be alive.

It skips across the cloth of time and space,
A pebble on a placid summer pond,
Unfettered by attachment to one place
Or time, which comes and goes yet makes no bond.

For there are always systems left to seek,
Adventures that remain for it to find.
So off it goes, a silent silver streak,
A ship the love for which it was designed.

A heart like this was never meant to hold.
It has the whole of spacetime to unfold.


—Glenn A. Meisenheimer