PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

" . . .In kitchen cups concupiscent curds . . ."

---Wallace Stevens, "The Emperor Of Ice Cream"

Those who still retain their sight have shattered all the

mirrors, and destroyed all the photographic equipment;

since human images are now unimaginably repugnant.

Visual artists may have considered this a significant shift in the

practice of their calling; but so few of their number remain that

hardly anyone bothers to depict anything any more, and

insufficient patronage exists to maintain the high costs of

museums' and galleries operations.  Music is more popular

than ever, although the dirge has replaced all other forms, and

daily, even hourly, the Dies Irae, is broadcast worldwide.

Values of the communication conglomerates' stocks surged

initially, but then began to dwindle precariously as sales,

subscriptions and usages declined---not in a curve, but a

straight line downward, as no one had anything original or

newsworthy to say or share; nor did we wish to take upon

ourselves the multide of the miseries of others, as they were

no more disheartening, and no more worth our efforts toward

compasssion, than our own.  Additionally, we were all kept

fairly busy memorizing, and then perfecting our recitation of, the

words of the Died Irae.  Our satellites fell from the skies; our

missiles, and other weapons, rusted in their silos and holsters;

our infrastructures degrade as our superstructures collapsed; and the

sound of the sea-surf against the shore became a monotonous

mockery of the loss we could never repair, replace, or restore---

life that had become mere existence, survival, not as it had been before.

No one, not even the wildestly imaginative science fiction writer,

had foreseen, or even considered, that the cancers would, and did,

achieve sentience; and, having achieved that, they had begun to

resent us almost immediately---we, of the living, who reminded

them that they were of the dying; we, who bore in our limbs 

splendor of human form became an aggravation and an

affront to them that were no more than mis-shapen tumors of

infected tissue, and malformed cells full of corrupted genetic code.

They began to mutate---and, in essence, to mutilate---our bodies, their

aflicted, but unwilling, hosts, rearranging our anatomies to

every more ghastly degrees of ugliness, decriptude, and the

inability to care for, or to cure, ourselves.  Bitter and spitefull fatalists,

these cancers are, well aware that our demise ensures their own; yet

suicidally compelled to accelerate that terminality when they can;

apparently finding distraction from their own damnable destiny in the

several kinds of anguish and agonh that they can impose upon us.

We became like the previously unchurched---whose Sunday evenings

held no assurance nor comfort, but only the confrontational

reality of the early arrival, the far too early arrival, of

another bleak and dismal Monday morning.  No historical contagion,

not even the leprosies of Biblical proportions, now seem as

horrifying a prospect of the dominance of these cancers upon us, the

pillage they delight to inflict upon us.  Yet, even the many ways and

means by which they damage and deform us are not as

utterly terrifying as the supreme hatred and prejudice toward

us (we who have created so many incapacitating carcinogens in the

capacity of our pursuit of the ever more convenienct and efficient)

that compels them to bring these awful atrocities upon and within us.

Starward