Coloring Contest

A message in a bottle can’t come nearly
fast enough for our seaside message-catchers.

Some stake out a spot by the shore at one AM,

some two AM the night before, some two nights before,

all for a chance to catch their own private message.

A rage for bottled messages sweeps across Babylon.

Children are put to bed wondering, “What will the one I get, say?”

The richest astronaut in the whole wide world finds
himself stranded on a chunk of the ring around Uranus.

He will reward one zillion black and white sesames
to the one who brings him a pipe wrench and pair of pliers

by Tuesday Greenwich mean time O-One-Hundred.

Too late to save the plutonium isolator, perhaps,

but not too late to fix the broken ventilator!

Three beeps by the escape hatch announce
the arrival of an intergalactic light-year-courier.

She needs last name and first initial
before handing over a ragged sock stuffed in a milk bottle.
There, between the rainbow dots and stripes
of a delightfully whimsical knit, the astronaut espies,
“You are delicious!”
His gums are spotted all over with sesames,
and I said, “I say, ‘Is there an extra genie in the house?’

Let me hear you say, ‘GENIE!’”

“GENIE!”
Say “GENIE!”

“GENIE!”