Upon awakening abruptly.

Behind the face, the skull within

The organ pulses.

Beyond the brain, the mind: a place

Without substance.

Hear the keening of the wind there

Salty lips are whistling

Tunes arcane to any tongue

Unremembered.

Every grain of sand a mountain

Each drop of rain a sacred font

Is this the path through utter darkness

Or the highway to the blessed realm?

Halt!

Time does not march here.
Return now to the world.

Tarvu day.

An alien identity is not something easily maintained without means of returning to the state from which that identity originally sprang.  It gets diluted. All human people were alien to this Earth-planet when they were conceived and born into it.  They cannot return to that alien infancy just as they (likely) cannot rightly claim to be made up of matter that is not part of this globe.  Cultural ideas of a post-lapsarian (after-the-fall) world are tied to this loss of innocence; or rather, growth from perfect potential to something definite and fixed.  Fighting the "sinfulness" of growing-up, people have created systems of belief that further entrench notions of sameness and shared, common thought.  When their child is born, a parent has the wonder-filled chance of re-living the alien state through its eyes.  Everything is strange and new again.  This is marvellous and also very frightening.  How can this little creature survive in this harsh reality?  The best chance of survival is acceptance into the congregation, uniformity, an inalienable birth-rite.  The alien is not for this world.

The infant-alien is full of possibility, but perfectly ignorant.  It is a stranger, but this is primarily due to the fact that everything is strange to it.  It is not alien to its parents, at least, not on a basic level.  The alien-ness is mainly metaphorical.  Another type of alien to consider is the "outsider".  This solipsist strives to remain other and alien in the face of insurmountable odds.  The state to which this creature must return to refuel his flying saucer is equally hard to reach as in utero.  An egoist in a vacuum.

The Native American vision quest might be a used as an example of a cultural system grown up around the outsider.  The quest itself alienates a member of the tribal group and sends them off, alone, to seek for answers of the spirits.  Better examples are probably the criminal, the outcast, and the leper.  Perhaps the best-known alien creature known to homosapiens of the Earth spent most of its life among such as these.  He taught them how to refuel, and how to get back home.

mashed potato for Christmas dinner.

'Twas Christmas
And the lithe wee bells did gyre and jingle in the wabe
All nimbly were the stockings hung
While consulting astrolabe.

Frederick Peener's rant

O! Audience.  Hear the cries of this life-form.  All the world is a soap-box.  Strange figures stand over us flinging harangues, calling for us to climb up out of the dust and hold them on high that they might catch sunbeams in their horny hands.  They stuff their pockets with this gold and demand yet more.

All the world's a hound, and we are merely flea-bitten.  We traverse the emptinesses in a crescent moon made from the pared toe-nails of our prophets.  The heavy breath and moaning of inexperienced lovers fills our silken sails, blowing willy-nilly, whither-we-know-not.  Maybe our craft will capsize and sink, without reason.  Maybe it will run aground and crash through the shell of a shining white egg and we will live out the rest of our days in the land of honey-combs and breast-milk.

I lie before you in such a state as this in hope to find rest.  Rowing to the rhythm of a timpani has exhausted me.  Lying together we could solidify the foundation on which to erect a tower; a tower to house the beings to come. They could build their own additions.  The tower will rise ever upward into the blankness of the future: a pin prick opening the heavens and commerce with the stars.

Squidboy and Mr.Shark narrowly avoid Cpt. Falloon.

The creature cannot let go. Its jaws have long since clenched in rigour mortis. It has fused with time and become what is often referred to as 'inanimate' -- a not entirely accurate term.

Kelvin produces his scalo-meter and, upon measuring, finds the lifeless remains are still reading well North of absolute zero. "It has passed into a fractured state of multiplicity" Kelvin says, to which Fig rolls deep purple eyes and disguises a twitter of laughter with a chirp of song.

"It may appear whole, but the bonds that unite its physical presence have already begun to return to lonely one-ness with the universe" Kelvin continues.

"So, it's 'dead' and 'rotting', got it" replies Fig.  "Don't you find it strange that the little monsters tighten up like this in preparation for decomposition? Wouldn't it be more expedient for them to burst apart, scattering atoms and energy everywhere at death, as we do?"

"Well, there's evaporation to consider" Kelvin begins to reply when his antennae detect a waft above them.  "We might have to find another specimen, Fig" says Kelvin.  "There is something on the gases, and it has spotted us. It may be hungry. Let us return later".