In the waiting room, the ills of this world
march out of step,
heavy with sickness.

Cancers bloom like fungus on strawberries
left too long in the refrigerator,
unwelcome intruders of internal spaces.

Hearts clogged with buttery deposits
strain to pump blood and oxygen
through a system dying from the inside out.

Brains worn out from ingesting a diet
filled with heavy metals and tragedy
drop their load of memory and culture

and melt back to the primordial.
We are B movie science fiction robots
short circuiting in a fireworks of sparks,

sputtering before we shut down
in a techno melody of decrescendo.
We have lost our within

and don’t know where to find it.

Is That A Whimper?

All that summer afternoon he sat there
in a nylon webbed lawn chair
placed in the shrub's shade
in his yard by the roadside.

Dressed in white cuffed trousers,
a wife beater tee shirt, and suspenders,
he watched the traffic whizzing by
and surveyed the landscape with a cold eye.

He looked like Richard Widmark sitting there--
Toothy grin, bronze skin, and wispy blonde hair--
waiting for his next film offer, a dear friend,
or the whole, wide world to end.

© Alan C. Reese

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