Because he saved his survivalist books
on his Kindle, when electricity
in the neighborhood understandably
sputtered in the face of massive riots,
dire predictions of inevitable
cannibalism, and frantic knocking
on his fortified front door (courtesy
of his prior-to-crisis-already-
irritating next door neighbor in search
of Peroxide to replace her whiskey
supply—which she claimed was for medical
purposes only, but for a woman
who ran the local Civil Defense Board,
climbing his front steps took her quite a while,
and she had only nicked her shin shaving
her legs using Crisco on the off chance
one of the television crews filming
impromptu beheadings and cheered hangings
throughout the city wished to interview
her regarding the success of her gauze
recycling program at the smoldering
remains of the local hospital). He
cursed his glaring lack of foresight into
the matter and attempted to pump more
juice from his gerbil. The complexity
of hooking his pet’s exercise wheel up
to his emergency generator
was daunting, to say the least, and because
he had saved the instructions on how to do
that on his Kindle at well, his gerbil
eventually died of exhaustion,
his irritating-prior-to-crisis
neighbor admitted her alcoholic
predispositions as he carved off half
of her bony buttock for dinner, and
then, because he hurled it against a wall,
his Kindle flared beyond revival. He
died. Humanity devolved much later
into dwarfish rat beings. They gnawed on
his skeleton. Kindle never came back.
[Editor's note: This poem and an accompanying poem, "Balls in the Evaluation Committee," were recently published in Wordgathering-A Journal of Disability Poetry (Volume 5, Issue 2, June 2011). Check them out!]
