If the stars align tonight, what would my mother say?

And the stars come out tonight. Twinkling their ever-glowing balls of hallucinogenic flames, wafting scents of burning sounds and booms of hysteria. Shining bright past airy clouds of smoke and gas like the fire on my mother's cigarette as it burns through the bushels of tobacco all covered up in its familiar white wrap. Burning, falling, fluttering away, the ashes disappear in the dead of night.

And the comet moves tonight. It revolves in its dreary path around the dismembered earth, around the endless galaxy, sprinkling dust and ice and scattered dreams into the sparkling and hopeful eyes that look up onto the dark sky. Looking into wisps of sex and lies and greed as they trail a path in the dead atmosphere like my mother's gray hair, growing older and older, never to return till the decade decays and turns to nothing but dust.

And the moon gleams tonight. So full and so grand a fixture on the sad skies, proudly stalking villains and heroes waiting in an empty alley. Nothing but another white ball in the floating ocean yet dubiously silent and still like my mother sitting on the front porch, looking past the street and the buildings with sagging arms and lips, unwilling, unsettled, unfixed.

And the clouds blow tonight. Slow like a turtle yet paced in its daunting suspense, hiding, hiding, hiding, sluggishly revealing in dark light the secret its been hiding for so long. Moving in mindless motion like my mother's anguished eyes as it followed a stranger walk away into the deep hues of fog and deceit, moving away till it was no more than a small gray line in the horizon.

And the meteors fall tonight. Gods and their catastrophic, apocalyptic omens, showering specks of light in the darkness as if comets were not enough a sign. They burn and burn and burn till they fall into the earth meteorites and nothing more, like my mother's sad youth, just fragments of tomorrow and today and yesterday and the days past.

And the planets turn tonight. Mercurial and anaclitic to the helium and the hydrogen and the dapper drugs of the empty grandeur of the vacuum machine called the cosmos. Giants on their clouds of fees, fis, fos, and fums but nothing bigger than a tear on my mother's cheek when seen from the patio where I stand on the sleeping grass, helpless, gloomy, disturbed and haunted.

And the world is silent tonight. The television set goes on and on about diet pills and exercise balls and televised exorcisms and hijack conspiracies. The neighbors sound of washing machines and clicking and clanging plates and ringing telephones and foolish gossip. The highway screams of traffic, car horns, of unwashed engines and murder. But the world remains as silent as my mother's face, half-asleep, half-expressionless.

I walk towards the porch. I sit.

If the stars align tonight, what would my mother say?

Nothing, as if the stars have always been.