More Weeping to Come in the Morning

BY RICH BOUCHER

We were the last of humanity;
we were the last, frightened remains
of an experiment conducted by God.
And then the machines made their move.

In the end, after the Terminators
made us all slaves, human slaves;
they made us eat only Fruit Loops
and drink only Mountain Dew.

The first few months went by
and we discovered that
only drinking Mountain Dew
caused us to have vertigo,
and also handicappedness.

We cried when we learned
that only eating Fruit Loops
caused our limbs to be as crackly
and fragile as balsa wood airplanes.

We began to look like the people
who, in the days before the end,
only ate cans of tuna fish for food.
We began to have a lot of weird teeth.

The terminators in their tin can hubris
taught themselves how to point and laugh
as we staggered like wide-eyed marionettes
to the gloom of the cafeteria for our meals.

I am the last human survivor.
The lower half of my body
is now taken up by a baby stroller,
because of Fruit Loops and Mountain Dew.

Forgive the machines;
they knew not what they did do.

A past member of five national poetry slam teams (Worcester, Mass. (x2), Washington, D.C., Wilmington, Del. and Albuquerque, N.M.), Rich has published four chapbooks of poetry and for seven years hosted an open reading and slam in Newark, Delaware. Since moving to Albuquerque in March of 2008, Rich has been performing and writing steadily in the Duke City, and is a regular contributor/editor at localpoetsguild.wordpress.com. Living day to day with physical abnormalities caused by the consumption of Monsanto’s supercorn, Rich is also an educator, adventurer and an unlicensed psychic. Rich’s poems have appeared in Adobe Walls: An Anthology of New Mexico Poetry, Fickle Muses, The Rag, Menagerie, Clutching at Straws, Shot Glass Journal, Mutant Root, The Mas Tequila Review, Borderline, and The Legendary. Hear some of his poems at: http://richboucher.bandcamp.com.