I still have flashbacks, horrifying and spectral: of conference meetings, projectors and efficiency meetings...corporate metrics, acronymic value cards that read like a Masonic Temple's pledge.. ...honesty, commitment, sacrifice, the dutiful worship of mercury and saltpeter; also customer satisfaction.
           Those flashbacks frequent my mind alot--especially when I am ramming my co-workers into the trash compactor with the blades of the fork truck. They say " ooooh" and " ahhhhh" as if they are getting a massage. They dull my blades with their dull heads.
          I have to ram them with the blades of the fork-trucks, or they will scramble out. They still say things like, " make sure that has a tag,".....and " wear your safety goggles," making chills run down my spine. I haven't put all the workers from the " Do-Wee depot" in the compactor only corporate cadavers and not zombies.
          But I have to forewarn, the zombies are not a threat, it is a few cadavers and the "consumers" that pose a threat to me and what I have built. The zombies are producers, even only if it is moans and putrefaction, but they are good sports, and my only friends.
         Some co-workers, who I was friends with before, I have spared from the compactor--owing mostly to that the part of their brain that was corporate, either fell out on the floor, or was gnawed on by a fellow zombie rendering them good sports and not cadavers.
        I use the building material section to chain them to their previous aisles. Jose, was my best friend, he was shaped like a slug, with a huge lower lip, and slicked back greasy hair, he always cheered me up, how busy it was and how slow he remained. Him and I worked together in the ' outside-lawn-and-garden' section. Even his zombie self has kept his lisp.
          I chain him to the outside lawn and garden section, where he likes to water the flowers. He lunges at me sometimes, but the chain is thick, and Jose is still a cool zombie.
Angry Joe is out there too. He is chained to the 'reach' truck. He is always mumbling about overtime.....or " Im not staying late."
         I have disabled the riding engine, so he just stands on it and runs the fork blades all the way up then all the way down, beeping the horn the whole while. He is the only one I kept, that has some vestige of corporacy in his brain, for the reason that he watches the back gate. The consumers are constantly probing this outside metal fence gate, and Joe has eaten all of them. Don't get me wrong, Joe can be a good sport, when he is not drooling about 'overtime' or ' I havn't took a lunch yet.' He can be quite funny.
          He banters with Ryan from inside 'lawn-and-garden' all the time. Ryan is alot younger, alittle younger than me. He has a mullet(what I call a mullet and he say's a hockey cut) and verily is--before he become a zombie-- the laziest person ever, and now that he is a zombie, well let's just say, I don't have to chain him anywhere, I know where to find him.....at the back gate smoking a ciqerette backwards with his mullet on fire or in the break room. He had the most squeeky voice when he was a human, but now odd fully enough, he sounds like Tom Jones.
         " You ate my cosumer Ryan," drools Angry Joe, " No I didn't Joe, you ate your own consumer," Ryan rejoins in his acapella voice ( I like hearing Ryan's deep zombie voice).
There are others, in the various departments of the Do-Wee Store, but this journal is to relate the first most pressing concern, two cadavers have escaped the compactor.
             The store manager Joyce and her minion(the assistant manager Damien) have escaped. They were ******* humans, and remained so in corporate cadaver form. They hide from me, as I plow through the aisles with the inside forklift. I have used wire from the fencing aisle to reinforce my forklifts. Sometimes a cadaver co-worker will jump out with a price gun, drooling " where is your spootterrrr...."( a safety regulation in the store).....I run them over with great gladness, but then wishing I heeded their advice of safety glasses."Splat."
            I have my theories, on how everyone turned to zombies. It started with over-ocurring routine, which my a.d.d could have been impervious to. But I couldn't have been the only one in the store with a.d.d? But that seems the case. The first day when I showed up to ' outside-lawn-and-garden' it took me six hours before I noticed everyone was zombies. I didn't notice they were zombies until I noticed them in good spirits.
               But the first day of the zombies, was concurrent with the rise of the consumers--ever more dangerous, greedy, and audacious are the consumers. They consume everything in their path, they consume good conversation, good manners, and replace with their mark, which is this....your life with the current moment is to be sacrificed to get them what they need to continue resuming their lives. They do not enjoy shopping, but enjoy holding you in place, consuming you and your values into their value, which has no value at all, since their mind has consigned the present moment that has you and not them, to a number that always has too much value, and they will bring you and it down while you are subject to time and they are not.  
             They turned my friends into prisoners of arbitrary time; and like putting a rabbit in a dank dark basement, with plenty of food and treats and space, it will slowly get diarrhea and die.  Everyday I marked the sunrise, and I would always pay thanks to it, no matter if I was on break or not.  The nine hour day could not ruin me, but my friends being ruined, that started to ruin me.
                       And that is what I believed started all this, nature has no room for two kingdoms of Consumers. So the producers(zombies) were created from the routine of being divested of life, and from nothing they came to produce: producing gases, vile ****** smiles, human  cannibalism, hearty conversation, practical jokes, moaning questions to the infinite sky.... they were created human again, given value, and most of all, I have my friends back, and they are happy again. But, the corporate cadavers that escaped the compactor , put my creation in risk, they look to let in the consumers again, they are up to something...
             But presently with the corporate cadavers gone, and the consumers held at bay, I have my Depot of Eden, I can grow anything, make anything, and soon will be able to ferment everything, especially fuel.   Now monday morning conferences that threaten you to pick it up because there are alot of people out there that want your job( iterated by the frizzy headed gangly Joyce) are replaced with 'zombie dance parties'.  
            " Zombies, what is the first rule of zombie dance party," they reply to me, " dohmp talk bout damp party," then we make a music video.  I let loose a couple of cat's in the break room, and presto, an agile cat make's flesh eating zombies look like Micheal Jackson.  Even I get busy with them, I feel so comfortable with them; dancing to Juvenile "back that *** up,".the best dancer gets to eat the cat...sure beat's listening Joyce's depressing morning pep talks about quotas while I am watching a bird outside the front glass trying to eat a dragonfly, " Keith you paying attention."  I just want to say, " No I am not you frizzy headed gangly walking skeleton key(she is skinnier than the gang of keys jingling on her belt)."    I will find her and put a roofing nail in her temple and her plans.
                The sound of zombies walking in here is music to my ears, like gypsys walking barefoot on a strawberry patch.  I don't know what that has to do with anything, but I like it, and don't care who knows.

            I fortified the outside of the store with everything within the store. I grew a garden, with all the fertilizers, and acids and alkilines of outside garden. I also use the garden chemicals to sprinkle on the brains of my co-worker zombies to change their acidity(almost like a hyrdrangea shrub). The purpose to get them somewhat coherent to play poker and darts in the breakroom. I figured out how to make explosives, with the nitrogen fertilizer and pool cleaning acid, well actually HeyZues did, he always eats both, and one day he moaned really loud  " BLOOOONDEEE " ( his nickname for me from The Good The Bad And The Ugly) and  gestured his expanding stomach, he blew up and gave me my first wound, he destroyed my dart board.   I took his head and posted it on the back loading dock, I know there are consumers trying to infiltrate when he sounds off with " BLOOONDEEEE..."  resounding through the whole store (almost like when he was a human).   I created another dartboard, I can create anything here, sometimes I think, that feeling is what........
                But the point of this journal is the two who escaped the trash compactor, Joyce and Damien. They haunted me before and haunt me still. When I leave to venture outside for gasoline for the generators(the only thing I need, not for long hopefully) they run amok. I will see new ' sale signs' in zombie penmanship, and I can see that they have hidden co-workers to have cadaver meetings, where they talk about ' customer satisfaction.'  I can sometimes hear keys jangle, it has to be Joyce, for the sound is to the cadence of her John Wayne walk, like she has been on horseback her whole life.
            Outside is very dangerous. There are many consumers out there.
                 I was outisde in the parking lot, where consumers still wallow around when a consumer asked "which product is better." I had to drop a cinder block pallet on him with the forklift; they are more adacious then my zombie co-workers. Even after a pallet of concrete is forklifted on them, they wave fliers with sale advertisments from underneath.
            Well, this particular trip, I returned inside and was startled by the loudspeaker, it was Damien's voice, the same as before, paging the hardware department. I jumped on the fast slim forklift to hunt for him. There are phone terminals everywhere, and he could be in the upper level offices. I saw Joyce's shape through the window once.
          They are up to something.
Everytime I ventured outside, the store became altered. I even saw a consumer waiting in line with the cashier machine now on. I sent the consumer to Angry Joe, who was due for a lunch break.
          There is a gap in my wire somewhere, I know it.
            I was at the gas station, getting propane and gas, when a consumer was scowling " where is the gas attendant, is everyone stupid or what?" while he was trying to figure out how to pump gas. I disabled the safety pumps, they do not shut off, and do not coincide with numbers, you hold the handle it pumps out as much as you need.
              He was pacing around like a little kid denied recess and suffering from sounds of frolic and kickball--dragging his feet due to the fact he had to pump his own gas, I heard a scraping metallic clicking noise. My eyes were caught by a bright glare on his shoe tread, I gripped my nail gun..... then he dropped the hose and walked back to his car with gasoline gushing as his wake. I saw what it was on his tread, I had no time to flee....it was a push button grill ignitor with the orange tint of a " Do-Wee" label on it......" ****."
              The last thing I registered was the consumer saying " ahhh don't touch me," apparently talking to flames. I woke up in a ditch, the big fork truck and my gas station destroyed.
I limped back to the " Do-Wee" store, and utter horror greeted my singed and surprised eyebrows.
              " Grand Re-Opening, 50% off everything." I squeezed the trigger of the nail gun, the nail harmlessly echoed off the parking pavement at which it was aimed. "They set me up at the gas station. "
               They had to do better than that to separate me from my zombies.

             I entered through the store in a nun-plussed state. I woke out of my unbelieving stupor with the sound of Jose's voice. " Welcome to Doooooo-Weeee....can I eat your...."
            "Jose it's me, who chained you to the entrance?"
         " Dammian, Keeeeeth, they are waiiiting....here's a newsletter...." --he smacked me across the face with the newsletter.
        " I don't want that ****.....' as I clutched the newspaper the loudspeaker went off in Dammians annoyingly over-polite and late-night-voice.
       " Attention shoooppers. all prices are feeeefty percent off, ask our associate Keeeeeth for a 80% discount, he is the skinny deleeecious looking kid with spicy skin, and a boston red sox hat on."
Hundreds of consumers pivoted their heads to my direction. " Hey, that kid has a Boston Yankees hat on."
         " Run Keeeth," zombie-lisped Jose.
           Fifty million imbecilic questions assailed me at once......" can I return this sprinkler for a jacuzzi.....can I get 120% off.....can you come to my house and fix my television for free"-- it was unabashed audacity, survial of the most annoying and repetitious; and the corporate cadavers have let this consuming flood in on me and my poor zombies.
           I needed to find my steed, my inside forklift. It was not where I left it near the entrance.            
        Surely they have sabotaged it. " the riding mowers," the thought uplifted my fading resolve. I darted past wallowing consumers before they could get my scent. I heard a consumer, " you obviously don't know what Im talking about," talking to zombie George, who was munching roofing nails.
         The consumer grabbed me, and said "here he is, this is Keith, he is wearing a Phoenix red sox cap"--panic bit into my brain, this consumers grip was implaccable. The grip that holds the steering wheel tightly driving nowhere fast, with anything in that interstice of commuting, not worthy of manners and the least of which being a friendly wave to 'go ahead.'
           They formed a wall of uttering stupidity, escape was cut off. They scratched at me, hissed, tore at my flesh and screamed demonistically in my ears. I caved and and called the hoard m'am and sir, they choked me, and loosened their grip only so I could tell them " Im sorry, sorry for your inconvenience, take my life and personality as tribute, take my imagination rendered prostrate by these sceptic corporate words that this mouth emits, betraying my personal form, the human element to this lifeless purposeless machine....destroy me, for finding the infinity between letters of corporate law and none between nature's laws......"
        I was almost unconscious, giving a speech to imagined hooded phantoms......" destroy me, for valuing friendship and imagination, and seeing infinity, in the shadow of a letter, eternity in the numeral of a number, and for defying the order to see things as others do....."...." destroy me, for seeing that people are unhappy and trying to uplift people for the sake of seeing them smile....destroy me, destroy my smirk, and add a lifeless smile to my corpse."
              I heard a horn, the riding floor mopper/buffer, it was Ryan, he commandeered the machine with precision-like drunkenness. He knocked down the consumers like twenty pin bowling. " What's up ***** cat," he possibly said, and I climbed to my feet.
         I walked to the riding mowers, and turned the key on the floor model. I sped the main aisle, with caresses of consumers that would be deep clawings at a slower speed. I dodged stupid question, and swerved from unabashed frugality. I turned up the tool aisle, grabbed a battery nail gun.
              " It says batteries are included, but are they included?" I answered with a 12 gauge nail, and resumed my course to the upper offices, that for too long looked down on me and my friends. I climbed the stairs and entered. The office was abuzz in corporate banalities. " Hello, this is Damian how may I help you.....oh helloooooo keeeeeth, one minute.......sir hold one second thaaaanx."
                I aimed the nail gun muzzle at his ugly overly polite mug." I finally found you, I will get the store back in shape Damian...."
          He cut me off, " no yoou woonn't, they are pouring in, we will meet our quota for the year...."
        " Me and my friends

861

Split the Lark—and you’ll find the Music—
Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled—
Scantilly dealt to the Summer Morning
Saved for your Ear when Lutes be old.

Loose the Flood—you shall find it patent—
Gush after Gush, reserved for you—
Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas!
Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?

You have no chance to rewrite your story
There is no way to erase mistakes
You can eclipse your shame with glory
But your faults will always rise the stakes.
You can’t escape your past and reputation
They both will chase you to the day of doom
And your tears shed in lamentation
Will not dispel the reigning sceptic gloom.
Do things of which you’ll never be ashamed
Be kind. Be grateful, generous and honest
Mean deeds will hurt you first, getting you defamed
The noble ones will make of you the greatest.

I remember the night my mother
was stung by a scorpion. Ten hours
of steady rain had driven him
to crawl beneath a sack of rice.

Parting with his poison - flash
of diabolic tail in the dark room -
he risked the rain again.

The peasants came like swarms of flies
and buzzed the name of God a hundred times
to paralyse the Evil One.

With candles and with lanterns
throwing giant scorpion shadows
on the mud-baked walls
they searched for him: he was not found.
They clicked their tongues.
With every movement that the scorpion made his poison moved in Mother's blood, they said.

May he sit still, they said
May the sins of your previous birth
be burned away tonight, they said.
May your suffering decrease
the misfortunes of your next birth, they said.
May the sum of all evil
balanced in this unreal world

against the sum of good
become diminished by your pain.
May the poison purify your flesh

of desire, and your spirit of ambition,
they said, and they sat around
on the floor with my mother in the centre,
the peace of understanding on each face.
More candles, more lanterns, more neighbours,
more insects, and the endless rain.
My mother twisted through and through,
groaning on a mat.
My father, sceptic, rationalist,
trying every curse and blessing,
powder, mixture, herb and hybrid.
He even poured a little paraffin
upon the bitten toe and put a match to it.
I watched the flame feeding on my mother.
I watched the holy man perform his rites to tame the poison with an incantation.
After twenty hours
it lost its sting.

My mother only said
Thank God the scorpion picked on me
And spared my children.

Meteoric Buick
Slick *****
Frantic frenetic
Majestic kick
Chick shtick
Shashlik

Nicotinic stick
Lick flick
Hermeneutic heretic
Magnetic rhetoric
Hick logic
Strategic

Plastic music
Tick click
Bucolic Bardic
Peptic druidic
Rustic emetic
Sceptic

Polymeric quirk
Sick trick
Turmeric trimeric
Septic *****
Wick crick
Derrick

•Don't you think you're standing too close
#But you did not oppose
•Cause your touch is so overwhelming
It numbs my brain
#So does your breath
Falling on my chest
•Maybe it's the lack of air inbetween
That's building this tension
#But this tension of our bond
Won't even let distance do us apart
•Who talks like that these days
#I'm witnessing one,
Between a boy and a girl of Laws
Stuck in the wonderland of Words
•That sounds more like the Never Never Land
#Don't let your sceptic shield come inbetween
Not tonight
•So that you can make me fall hard and deep
#So that I can kiss your wounds to heal
•But the soar soul will bring it back
How will you touch that
#Through that Venus trap you have for lips
•Your beard is no less of spikes
Growing goosebumps all over my skin
Running that chill across my spine
#It's good our interactive field **** our brains
At least for once our hearts can overtake
•I'm such a submissive to your strong gentle hold
#I'm so weakened at the sight of your rising-falling stole

..
Violation seeps in through every pore
The girl feels like a common *****
As men poke and **** with joy
Manipulating their new favourite toy
They sneak close enough to callously drool
Then further, breaking the cardinal rule
She feels an unwanted touch
Then begins to cry, deeming it too much.
..
With a purse brimming with cash
And a covered sceptic rash
The pretty woman walks casually
Sheltering any notion of tragedy
This was her first day of vacation
From her new laid back vocation
Though if a client was to approach
She wasn't beyond reproach
..
Horizontally gifted
An archway lifted
Customized displeasure
In any kind of weather
Morals slowly give way
To the luxury of good pay
Loneliness takes a back seat
To those with a thing for feet.
....
Stepped in late
A darkened slate
Crippled by fate
And a desire to be great
She felt like a clown
On her long way down
Then she lost her place uptown
To the notion of a gown
..
Poor girl
She had quite the whirl
Had five long years
Which left a few souvenirs
One being a harsh complexion
and the other being a hollow reflection
Now she has the rest of her life
To wallow in the footsteps of a wife
..
Soon her son would ask what she used to do?
The mother would reply, to who?
Ashamed she would pace
Trying to save face
Confused her son would leave
As the woman ran off to heave
Sick from the thought
That one day she would be caught
..
Sitting at lunch
A bully prods on a hunch
Displays an image
Of his mother's visage
A picture of an awkward pose
Featuring the woman in no clothes
Others began to taunt
As the poor boy went gaunt
....
Over the years some would knock on the door
In a meagre attempt to score
A run in with a *****
Who would take it on the floor
Of course they'd all be turned away
But the pain always seemed to stay
It was shown in the light of day
To be many needles in a sole piece of  hay

Is humanism Utopian?
You really have to think about it.
Or is it rather more dystopian?
No, then I think you’d never doubt it.
It seems that disbelief is best.

Humanism owes a debt
to thinkers of the Enlightenment,
although I haven’t paid it yet,
I think of it as my entitlement
to settle it at some behest.

I very early cleared my mind of Kant,
experiencing a vast relief,
approaching his chef d’oeuvres extant;
removing knowledge to allow belief;
the opposite of what he had expressed.

It occurred to me I ought to dig up
(or should I say instead ex-hume?)
what constitutes at least an egg-cup-
full of wisdom that I might consume
with non-platonic zest.

But wondering how on earth to do so
and thinking he might hold the key,
I fixed my sights on Jean Jacques Rousseau
and set sail for my destiny,
while trying not to feel depressed.

Voltaire’s voices loudly rang in deaf ears
as did the Persian Letters of Montesquieu
and failed to still my latent fears.
And thus I felt no need to rescue
Adam Smith (morality-obsessed).

To put Descartes before the Horse-
men of the Apocalypse
War, famine, pestilence and worse.
Who could guess it would eclipse
my thought, wherefore I was oppressed.

Or take the case of Denis Diderot
a friend of Hume and others seedier.
and one you might consider so
rash as to produce an encyclopedia
to get his knowledge off his chest.

That precious quality of truth
was Mary Ann’s# description of it.
It would not take a Sherlock sleuth
to simply thus produce a conviction of it:
an elementary request.

I cut my questing teeth on Russell.
His secular logic had a profound effect
and seemed to stir each red corpuscle
inhabiting this fervid non-sect-
arian but doubting breast.

I later turned my eye on Dawkins,
and his concern with my divine delusion.
A sceptic whose inspiring squawkings
validate my disillusion
and emphasise an ill-starred quest.

And so I felt the pointlessness of it.
Progress is the best end for a man to see
And belief simply produced less profit
for reality’s dispelling of my fantasy.
So, in the end, I acquiesced.

#Mary Ann Evans, aka George Eliot, in *Adam Bede

MY FIRST & LAST LOVE LETTER

This I declare as my first & last love letter
Dedicated to the woman who looked at me and thought that I was better
In a sea of many men with fragile hearts and broken dreams
She chose to mend mine
In the process of putting the pieces together, she used herself as the glue & now
She is permanently a part of my new Picasso image of refined love.
A kind heart that lacks not a kind word in moments when emotions overflow
Poetry makes it easy for me to express these emotions
'Cause if I was an ordinary man I would have died in silence & left her seeking solace
Jesus would have to come back & perform all his miracles in order to reach out to her heart & resurrect my soul.
Enough about the riddle talk now let's go back to the love notes that make up this melody in my heart
The woman with a smile that brings out the life in my soul
She, the woman who invades my thoughts more than a germ invades a surface.
I find myself humming love tunes & writing love poems at the thought of you
Hoping to spend all my desired forevers with you
If only this was to be true
We all know that life has no guarantees
So I have prepared & cleaned up a small room for disappointment because of you
'Cause this love thing we have going seems too good to be true
Call me a sceptic but I've come to believe that your presence in my system is therapeutically septic
You have injected me with life but you still remain the potential cause of my fate
Explains why every time after I ****** in your presence at the dear end I end up in a faint
Totally disconnected from existence
A wonderfully dreadful experience
A once in a lifetime moment that resulted in me writing you this love poem
Which I have declared as the first & last love letter because I believe that you deserve better...   (to be continued)

When I hear you express an affection so warm,
  Ne’er think, my belov’d, that I do not believe;
For your lip would the soul of suspicion disarm,
  And your eye beams a ray which can never deceive.

Yet still, this fond ***** regrets, while adoring,
  That love, like the leaf, must fall into the sear,
That Age will come on, when Remembrance, deploring,
Contemplates the scenes of her youth, with a tear;

That the time must arrive, when, no longer retaining
  Their auburn, those locks must wave thin to the breeze,
When a few silver hairs of those tresses remaining,
  Prove nature a prey to decay and disease.

Tis this, my belov’d, which spreads gloom o’er my features,
  Though I ne’er shall presume to arraign the decree
Which God has proclaim’d as the fate of his creatures,
  In the death which one day will deprive you of me.

Mistake not, sweet sceptic, the cause of emotion,
  No doubt can the mind of your lover invade;
He worships each look with such faithful devotion,
  A smile can enchant, or a tear can dissuade.

But as death, my belov’d, soon or late shall o’ertake us,
  And our *******, which alive with such sympathy glow,
Will sleep in the grave, till the blast shall awake us,
  When calling the dead, in Earth’s ***** laid low.

Oh! then let us drain, while we may, draughts of pleasure,
  Which from passion, like ours, must unceasingly flow;
Let us pass round the cup of Love’s bliss in full measure,
  And quaff the contents as our nectar below.