Zombie Walk

These figures, contorting and dead faced, march in straight lines with a robotic swagger. Thin and gaunt, they are so beautiful and I don’t know why.  These figures, that keep me up at night, both male and female, are killing us all slowly.  They stare from shop fronts and billboards and train doors and urinals and tv commercials.  They corner every shopping mall and taunt the elderly and the ugly and the disfigured as they pass through the intestines and out through the anus onto Nepean Highway, with double the bags they thought they would have, in a size too small than what they should have.  These figures, picked from our young like grapes by poor immigrants disguised as executives with silver hair and flashy suits.  They run the streets in packs and attract us, who, not knowing better, act like fireflies to an unguarded flame. And burnt, always burnt, we sit in our clothes that cost a modest sum, in our dreams that float above us like their beauty, thinking of life as a zombie.

This apocalypse, the end of us all, they search for every new place to show their bodies, their faces, their breasts, their abs, their shoulders, their genitals. They proliferate a different kind of war, one not based on money or race or gender, but of chance and self deprecation. And I sit, always burnt, aroused and confused, frustrated, with a chip on my shoulder, thinking “why couldn’t that be me on that billboard? On that train door, in pretty girls dreams? Why couldn’t that be me, wearing expensive clothes and touching expensive things, with cameras on me all the time? Why couldn’t I walk the contorted zombie walk down avenues that I haven’t heard of, in discreet and expensive bars that sit underground, where Elvis still roams.  Why couldn't that be me fucking the most sought after people? And as I sit, burnt, I see them approaching me on my tv screen. One after another they come. and I fumble to change the channel, dive from one couch to the other looking for the remote. One after another they come.  I turn, no spin, no pirouette to face the television once more.  Naked and six feet tall with all the lights on and all the blinds pulled up I watch a pretty little things with ribs popping out and cheek bones popping out and elbows popping out at the base of skinny fat arms that couldn’t lift a brick or a pen.  Its just me and her like an old western.  She is starring down the barrel held by some guy who is having the same feelings as I am having.  blah blah blah