The History of Space Travel

The History of Space Travel

The History of Space Travel

In truth, the history of space travel
is a history of rooms
                        —I kept a room
those eleven years in the Hotel Hyperion.
It had been a prison, the first in orbit,
and its guest rooms kept the old locks.
The Futures Museum was paying me for artefacts
from the failed outposts of settlement
                        —Those years, voyaging
to the forsaken places, I slept
more than I woke, never shaking off
the after-weight of anaesthetic sleep
before I slept again—places that held then
in my mind like so many self-lit dreams
but for the relics I brought back
                   —I used to time my waking
for the radio line where their abandoned
voices first shaped words in static
the way a figure wades out of mirage
dripping with light. Whispers, pleas,
accusations, prayers—voices in their afterlife
talking me out of sleep—