In habiting
That thin lyin’
Between living and undead
Pray and prey
Plodding for survival so chaste
Eerie reverence
For awe virtually unmoving
They’ve got
You’re numb-er
Too many to re-pulse
To take account of
De-sending from cubicles and proto-calls
Contracting art and sole
As-certain
As a ballad to ahead
Or souled heart for a song
Forging for a meal ticket
Having mist
The notice
Of the zombie apocalypse
Having all ready past buy
As things sow sterilized
And humanity’s fate sown up
In arms and sordid extremities
Have eaten
Half alive
Only too whither the storm
The moot in one’s eye
Of learned haplessness
And ever abating brains
Until getting the best of you
As present itself
As in genius solution
The just
Walk away
Hope realized as traveling light
And renouncing
Carrion
If a zombie apocalypse poem is particularly relevant for you on a Monday, then you may be suffering the blurring of your existence as living or undead. The popularity of zombies in current culture strikes me as an apropos metaphor for the deep and abiding alienation present in much of everyday life. Alienation is endemic in multiple spheres: alienation from our own humanity by being submersed in artificial and virtual realities; alienation from others by having life mediated by impersonal institutions and technologies; and alienation from nature and the natural world by working in cubicles, living in self-contained boxes, and traveling in mobile cages of steel, plastic, and rubber over rivers of petroleum byproducts. Zombies seem to be the incarnation of our collective ennui and existential angst over our preternatural penchant for mistaking motion for progress and our banal disability in distinguishing between any vital life force and inanimate matter. The titillating trepidation of slow, barely animated monsters overtaking us in our hurried existence gives freakish flesh to our fears. The undead have some surreal power to overtake the caffeinated, if not sublimely discerning, protagonist humans slash food. Their sheer number or inexplicable relentless hunger — fed by their will to unlive? — overwhelms any resort to our keen or ken. We fatally mistake our presents as mere fuel or fodder saying chow to our humanity. This helpless and hapless existence is, in fact, the fantasy, a projection of our fears, that inanimate forces haplessly set in motion are the ultimate arbiters of the human sphere. Without resort to stale arguments about free will, human freedom and the like, I will only say that if the posers of zombie powers that be come to my door, I intend to say “Eat me!”
Carry on.
