Galactic Retirement Village

Its like everwhere else -
children, sentient pets,
great great great and not so
wonderful grandhchildren,
bonded android servitors, clones -
show up a few times out of guilt
or its biochemical equivalent
then, less and less.
Why bother?
THEY don’t recognize
anyone “outside’ anymore -
like a holographic bedside display
memory focuses to a sharper
momentary recognition
then fizzles out.

Heart disease, cancer, Aids,
STDs are quaint footnotes
in medical history journals,
but those little gray cells still
eventually
wear out – and a good thing too
or I wouldn’t be drawing on this pay card.

Lavender scented air-freshener
is locked in a timess duel
with pungent urine for preeminence -
small pockets of ozone, brimstone
flare up, settle down.

The colonial legged spinx,
formerly a tea trolley,
challenges Doris to a riddle
she deciphers with false logic
and deca-septigenarian panache.
The grandfather clock
smolders in the corner
mistaken for Gerald’s first attcking troll,
transmogrified into stone once again
by his stuncane.
I squander most of the late afternoon
unscrambling the hoard of swiped dentures
Gertrude stashed under her bed in a pillowcase.

Harvey leans back in the antigrav chair
scheming his next escape from this dungeon
of elevator music, plastic flowers
permaplastic surgery,
implausible pleasure droids.
Edna peers into her mirror program.
A love hex of pheromones
and superimposed visual simulacra
seduce the physical therapist,
the social director
our resident gerentologist,
the chemical mood programmer -
all beaus at her bidding.
The comic relief is welcome.

“It’s a long way to Tipperary”
the singalong non-gender specific
one-person band blares
and it IS a long way -
from anywhere with green grass
and naturally oxygenated air.

Snynzxx
wins 4-D bingo
again
his smug sonic hoots
agitate the game room
sufficiently for the medflow
air pumps to activate
a discreet sophor surge.
No one points out that he cheats
telekinetically -
He is quite the sore loser
and the same talent
is capable of inflicting
a mean migraine, I should know.

I’m on second shift tonight.
Something that tastes and smell like
chicken cordon bleu is on the menu,
something vaguely the consistency of chicken soup
and something that looks like
chicken croquettes made from
processed quorn subsitite byproduct.
Harold changes the rice pudding
into a hot fudge sundae and back again.
The wallpape paste flavor never falters.

I sponge off the drool,
make appropriate chortles to induced
false memeory remniscences.
Then Rosalind recalls her youth
as a barebacked pony rider in the circus.
“Liar, liar, pants on fire!” shrieks Tonya,
“that was MY youth, you filthy liar!”

I hastily program the foolproof
“when my grandma took me
to Horn and Hardarts automat in the city
for a sandwich and lemon meringue pie”
and by the time we went all the gravchairs
through the virovac, peace is restored
and we steer everyone to bed
dreaming of coins counted lovingly
into the machine.

Spring Unmasks Inside the Reptile House

In primordial darkness
the inside of my calf
is brushed my the doubt of an air current -
or negligent fastening of a latch?

Their blood is cold.
Yet here buds a passion to unmask
unveil, disrobe, reveal,
shed outer layers
in pulsing, throbbing contortions
or simply to crawl out from under.
Translucent powdery membranes shed
to a single sustained chord
of shared reptilian communication
just within range of tympanic audibility
with fizzing fluorescent light resonance.

Chameleon, the Chinese Monkey King,
The Dineh Coyote Trickster,
his eyes move in as many directions
as his loyalties.
He exfoliates every color he has known.
He is white or black
the absence of color – the saturation of color.
Black and Blanc and Blank,
the Persian concept
of the other side of the prism.
He reflects all things to all people
but guards his secrets
beneath a jaunty gray hat.

Rancid eleant vanity,
Basilisk Lizard
peels back coruscated spiny frills,
fractalling minutely
into smaller and smaller patterns
of loving self absorption.
He courts his emerging reflection
with intricate clockwork gestures,
longing for his own voice
to call his mechanical moves poetry.

Brown Viper, size petite coquette,
tastes everything without an appetite.
Simply moves forward,
flicking her dainty fork
to abandon used up derma
like another doting admirer.
If glass were a quicker liquid
her venom mould sing giddy requiems
in all her victims veins.

Half baked in heat lamp regret,
Gila (not a true) Monster
scapes loose pocked tegument
of tacky lurid red-black-yellow macho.
He reeks salival poison
between smack-down wrestling matches
with other so-called monsters,
dreams of fashioning
a tenderly folded origami jacket
for a crab with clacking pincers
he met on a long ago ship
that sailed them here,
where they were forever sorted
by taxonomy, not desire.

Surfacing through oily slicks
scattered with her own discarded scutes,
Map Turtle settles to bask.
New destinations emerge upon her carapace
etched deeper than any journey
she will ever be permitted.
But why share these lines and with whom?
Her secret joy is encoded
in the fantasies designed upon her plastron
and to reveal these
she awaits one worthy.

Glass Lizard
like the Spanish proverb
of the blue-eyed boyfriend,
if you leave him he will shatter
or his tail will snap off -
or so he claims.
But note that he gulps his beer with his pills
and sheds his shards
at the angle of maximum effect
to inflict pain
on the foot that finds them.

Soughing away great scabs of skin
heedless of smothering jealousy within
devoted to possess fanatically
Python embraces most emphatically,
squeezes into anaphylactic euphoria
with visions of mythic Hyperborea
each coil carefully reticulated
to allow no pleas for breath articulated.

Their blood is cold, but warming up.
Their skin is new.
Outside the Bronx Zoo air
is fetid with Spring.