Alien Infection by Bruce Boston
A language fugue in plague major.
A fever that elates the imagination.
An alien utterance in our midst.
Tongues transformed to babbling towers
that swell from between the teeth
to trumpet nonsense sibilant and dense.
While neighbors drone fluently
in dialects that stretch their lips
and distort the lines of their features,
those uninfected stare in speechlessness.
Unsettling as the jaundiced auburn sky
where reflected images of our cities
appear to blur elongate and dissolve,
it begins in the open marketplace
as Tarval the tailor rushes to his shop
to cut and stitch great pleated coats
with sleeves for which we have no limbs.
A generation past we wrought the hecatomb
that emptied this world for our exploitation.
Unknown to us its slaughtered populace
sought vengeance in our veins: nanoscopic
viral snakes, coded to coil the DNA,
corrupting our cells in a planned mutation.
Alien values reverberate within our skulls.
We crave foods that burn our bellies,
that provide no sustenance or taste.
We caress the lumps beneath our flesh
and accept the sights of our altered vision.
Those indecipherable glyphs now make sense.
We understand we have sinned against ourselves
and travel by caravan to their desolate hives
to don abandoned lives as a kind of reparation.
On the solidified gel of fallen panes,
where decades of dust have mold-congealed,
we sketch the figures of thwarted deities
with our gnarled and native walking sticks
as the auburn winds begin to wail.
illustration is Last Judgement by – http://www.wassilykandinsky.ru/work-469.php
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.