In a dream I walked
through a small town in winter,
snow was drifted all around,
building after building was dark,
empty window shops, abandoned.
At the heart of a naked strip mall
there was a tiny boutique,
Chinatown style.
Cheap throw away electronics,
plywood guitars, plastic purses
fast-food clothing,
and wall to wall glass cases.
It strikes me now, it was not a shop
but a museum, filled with relics
of the oh-too-recent past.
Homemade cassette mix tapes,
with pink bedazzled stars,
and neat hand written script,
zip disk encylopedias,
mildewed black moleskines,
and much more, the mind
it could not take it all in.
I was wrenched from this museum,
back into the waking world
by a full bladder, and a cold crown.
I slipped on a cap, but I hold it in,
desperately I try to convey
the frozen tragedy I have witnessed,
with moist unblinking mind's eyes.
The shadowy windswept streets,
the random half broken neon signs,
the peeling sky blue painted storefront,
and the tiny boutique, a dream place,
that could only ever afford
to pay the rent
in the depths of my subconscious.
It strikes me, that I am blessed
to be a tail-end-member,
of Generation X, the last generation
that can remember the corpse
before it died, to have watched it die.
To have lived through this death,
to have watched the desiccation
and to have seen the dead body
***** by heartless robots,
to give birth to a Mummy Earth,
a world without a soul.
Soon I will be forced to go downstairs
and relieve myself,
on the ground outside
For now, I lie on my side,
thumb typing, shoulder aching,
from supporting my weight,
sore eyes assaulted
by the too-bright-white screen.
I lie here, trying to capture it;
the feeling of strangled despair.
Not for myself, but for the children
who have inherited a dead cyborg,
devoid of its humanity.
A corpse culture, with perfect teeth,
glistening hair, fair skin,
cloudy eyes, and the faint stench
of moldy leather and spoiled spices.
They do not know what it is like
to feel, to have beauty ripped
from their desperate dream hands,
like children dragged away
from their arrested mother.
They inhabit a foster home
for the spiritually bankrupt,
the true tragedy is
they don't know any better.