Exit Up About Now

Artwork by Arun Jayaprakash

We are zombies bored to undeath around a roundabout.
Commotion
Sadness
Fear
all great mysteries to us,
we who
lay with each other,
our compadres
complete strangers,
scratching our stomachs smearing our skin with our zombie blood
dripping from where stood our uprooted fingernails.

Zombies of a new age,
we do not understand time's passage,
the progress of seasons.
We measure out our lives in mouthfuls of yawns,
our bloodthirst rusted over an era of famine,
we munch on concrete and steel,
and idly inspect the pieces of our shredded intestines in our dull zombie shit
undigested, unaccepted,
souvenirs of a daily apocalypse.

What do we know of the faces that peek through the windows of the cars
that come and go,
bend like light around a black hole,
slingshot around the multi-exit roundabout
and wheeze off in the horizon?
A certain boldness in the certainty of their exit,
a certain assurance in their crankshaft revolution,
fails to rev up our own (once revered) broken engine.

Dust? Smoke?
Colorblind,
Thickskinned,
fresh wanderlust-free fine-ground universe
on our layered skin;
screens on our eye sockets,
starved to stillness
we're some zombies
lost about a roundabout.