THE
ZOMBIE-KILLING
BLUES
Baby, when 1
say I need some time to myself,
all I am really saying is that I wish
all of humanity was dead except for me.
All I really want right then is to be living
in a tank on a beach, where every morning I rise
to slip into my jumpsuit and gas mask, to shoulder
my Kalashnikov, and make for a stroll down the sand.
When I come home tired and pale and pissed
because my boss thinks being late
for The Columbus Day Sale is The End of the World,
I am seeing the sky
as the rough underslab
of concrete, the sea the color of beer, sparkling
with shrapnel, and my boss, his eyes gone
and jaw unhinged, lurching across the wet sand-
I know it's him because of his nametag-
and I place him in the crosshairs and fire a clip
into his bloodless head, because a man has got to survive, Darling.
So, when you ask
me, What's wrong, Dear?
nothing is, per se. It's just that
it's not easy to want the future
so badly all the time to be happening right now.
None of this means
I don't love you right now,
Sugar, because I most certainly do. Some nights,
while you are sleeping, I am awake and can feel
in your breathing that you are out there, and soon
I am following your delicate footsteps
in the sand, then hiking up the highest dune,
where I part the tall, dry grass and find you
wrestling a vicious zombie, its bloody, pearly
teeth bared, your elegant fist
machine-gunning into its papery skull.
And I always stand back, in the grass, to watch
and fall in love, keeping a goggled eye
wary for other zombies that might happen
through the grass. We always make it
to the end, Sweet Thing. We leave bodies
in our wake as we walk into a sudden sunrise.
But, Honey Baby Doll, unfortunately we find
nothing is never-ending, because
the sunrise is a wall at the end of the horizon
that burns and burns and burns,
and through which even we cannot pass.
