Thursday, February 19, 2015

Alan Catlin- Three Poems


The CHUD's
(Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers)

They only appear at night
wearing dark clothes, exposed
pale-as-death skin covered by
face paints, resins living things
stuck to as they made their way
down deserted platforms, under
turnstiles, past token seller/change
maker booths fire bombed for
effect, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE....
spray painted on the white tile
walls in bloodred coloring, graffiti
artist murals scene after scene from
an urban Inferno/Hell depicting alien
creatures much like those making
their way slowly, deliberately as
mollusks in trench coats, human slugs
trained in a silent ninja art of sudden
death inflicted by common household
items: church key bottle and can openers,
meat thermometers and rolling pins,
wires from antique egg slicers honed
to points as artery cutters, blood vessels
punctured so fast, death is almost instant,
almost painless, the aftermath grim
and disgusting, their cook fires sweet
and subdued confined to oil barrels
and trash cans well underground,
so far removed from human habitation,
no one dares track them.


Radio Kaos

Everyone on the island
she ended up on knew
her as the radio woman
dressed in multi-layers
all summer long as a
walking clothes tree all
the fabrics turned inside
out to preserve what
remained of original
prints, designs, logos,
perhaps as part of a
hidden agenda or a search
for sponsors of her personal
walking, talking one woman
news show she broadcast
in perfectly enunciated
disc jockey speak all of
the special events as they
were happening Live for
everyone's enjoyment,
ready or not.  Cynics
suggested: what would
happen if her transmission
frequencies changed and
she became a receiver
of conversations from
another wavelength or
if the format changed from
all news, all the time to
hard rock, CxW, classical
music?


Wireless Transmissions

Somehow mother had confused
her father's position as an
early executive with AT&T
with Marconi's intent to
make wireless transmissions
across the Atlantic extend to
the dead so that whenever
she picked up a telephone,
the expectation was that,
somehow, the person to whom
she was connected, their existence
was in another life beyond
this one, that is, officially
listed among the white pages
of the no longer living
and that by calling someone
in the book, automatically
reversed the charges and sent
valuable negative existence
ions into her world; the longer
you talked, the closer to death
you came, resulting in some
strange, one-sided conversations,
though, in retrospect, not brief
enough.

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