#5 1994
a poem for younger readers from my hypertext novel axel-and-alice
yaaargh
shit I said
what’ll we do?
thunder
and the green lightning in the garden
ruptured the tight belly of the house
the front door split
kids poured out
their faces streaked with energy
wild caricatures
they floated out on fast forward
exploded among the redwoods
the himalayan cypresses
what was left
of the exotic plantation
left to jungle itself
out of the nineteenth
century
these kids were space age freaks
green hair
with mauve patches
sucking and snorting, weird as scenery crammed through windows
they were real
the little darlings were on the warpath
where could we hide?
what could we do?
a young one
about twelve years old
floated over the ground toward me
waving a hatchet
his eyes rose in their sockets
he rammed the weapon down on my skull
it didn’t so much hurt
as penetrate
like being shot from above
with a hot banana
I didn’t know whether it was
premeditated
the next thing you knew
(I didn’t know, I was no longer in the equation)
was an ecstasy of terror
a whole swarm of the little buggers
shifted several frequencies and
gotcha! they cried
and the rest of the adults
who moments ago were just
hanging around useless in the forest
were slugged into bags of mucus
slung on sharp shoulders
and shot off to some market place
plucked out of a directory of medieval fantasies
it was only then
you could put the book down
and tremble along the shelves
to the next genre
where the bestial profiles
of slaves and peasants
morphed to star quality high definition virtual
reality