Alan Catlin- Three Poems

Zombie Strippers

There must be a moral and a story

buried somewhere beneath all that

hideous makeup. An unfortunate,

small, random sampling of mid-

movie scenes, suggest there were

not enough letters in the alphabet

to downgrade it, sort of like grade Z

minus sigma nu rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Why anyone, even a pudgy dweeb,

a past it, studly and well-dressed black

man, who way should have known better,

could find these scantily clad, barely able

to ambulate, ghoul faced hags, hot, was

beyond comprehension. As was all three

of them accepting back stage invitations

to be objects of some kind of gory lap dance,

movable feast. But this was not the kind of

of movie that allowed for questions about

faulty logic, plot consistency or deep

emotional commitments. Consulting

summary of movie during ads revealed

little other than the star was a porn actress

of some repute, once upon a time, known

for her talents on screen not generally

confused with Art.  Maybe this was

the kind of feature where past-it sex

stars went to revive their flagging careers

forever, recruiting new flesh as they worked

in a never-say-die-kind-of way.

The unanswered question of substance must be,

do breast implants matter in Zombieland?

Animatronic Men

Lurk, unobserved in late night

shadows, savvy as contract killers,

biding their time on the edge of

restive crowds, circuits overloaded

like a class picnic for children of

the damned, charged on Ritalin,

all of them singing Talking Heads songs

in synch, burning down the house

with their eyes creating a new kind

of disco inferno, oh those body

snatcher lips and those soul sucking

mouths hungry for more, more, more,

all the while those animatronic men

laugh, oh, how they laugh.

The Conga Line from Hell

There they are the revelers

wearing cheap conical hats,

bearing breath-controlled,

retractable whistles, metal

noise makers they all employ

at once as an ear drumming assault,

all in the name of dressing up

in new frocks and suits to

consume vast amounts of legal

beverages and other kinds of

mind altering chemicals,

driven to become adherents

of Nietzsche’s “everything is

permitted” edict, all rules

abolished once partying begins,

all sense of propriety forgotten,

unlikely liaisons formed in back

room office space, hotel storage

closets, under banquet tables cloaked

in white linens as if some merry

musician, band leader, had declared,

“Let the humping begin!”

Background music becomes the refined

crude that fuels the savage beast,

that suggests otherwise responsible

adults form a line alternating men

and women , grab the waist of

the humanoid in front of you and

let the dance begin, let this hydra

headed millipede begin unrestrained

kicking anything within its path to

jungle fever music, all the faces

wide eyes and lust crazed, mindless

as a herd of headless chickens,

all of them slaves to the hypnotic

beat, following the command of

a pied-piper-with-a-drum music man,

that bandleader of the doomed

exhorting the dancers to kick,

kick, kick until they drop, spineless

and spent in dark, unfamiliar place,

dead to the world.