[While going through some old poetry today, I discovered this little ditty. I couldn’t resist posting it.]

I am sick of the postapocalypse. Here we are,

eating human flesh on the Strip in casinos burned

by atomic fire about to devour some successful

rancher’s son while masked a la Eyes Wide Shut.

 

We’re supposed to converse w/ what seems like

an AI[1] but we’ve gotten curiously sidetracked,

this awkward looking young woman and I

as we’ve traversed the terrible wastes doing,

well, whatever it was to do that came along.

 

We’ve passed through this night waiting

for someone to sneak into a guard tower in

an old airport control tower.[2] In real time.

 

Here we are, perched on a hotel in Vegas,

a high enough vantage point to see the bombs

go off in the desert. Here we are, burying mountains

of nuclear phlegm beneath plaques bearing the universal

hieroglyphic for, well, death. The postapocalyptic

 

has infected us. We breathe its miasma and blow it

out our eyes in radiant spectacles of retro-horror

nuclear nostalgia from an alternative twenty-first century

 

in which some mysterious stranger rolled into town

w/ “a big iron on his hip”[3] and we were her, blowing

ghouls away. We’re all patiently waiting for the MMO.