[: :] Boiler World [: :]
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I had a nightmare that would not quit
And trapped me tight as a tourniquet
To the very wounds upon my fingers.
My cruel curse in this way lingers:
The smell of old is the smell of dark,
And rusted machines are grotesque and stark
Against a background of chemical grime
That coats their edges with oil and slime.
As angled and foreign as alien races,
Puking out smoke from their bolt-studded faces,
While gray ugly creatures attend to their joints
Firespouts punctuate the smog at points.
In an orange glare and scorching flash,
My own gray flesh my eyes do catch;
Instantly my brain is taxed,
For these limbs of mine are like hairless wax.
At the end of this wretched arm my hand
Is a skeletal knot of fingers and
Crusted with calluses, worn and bleeding
From twisting bolts on machines that are breathing.
Retching up in this misshapen gray chest,
A boiling scream starts to wrest
As the other gross creatures force me back,
Fusing my body with a rust-diseased rack.
My shrieking throat soured with tar
And like corrosive moss the rust did mar
My limbs, now bound by jointed vents
That funneled smoke up from my bowels incensed.
The meters fused to my rusted face,
Pointed red needles twitching in place,
At the infernal numbers as the fire roared,
Gagging up embers while the dirty flames soared.
The bald deformed creatures scuttled quickly by,
Taking no notice of the sparks shooting high.
No gray creature stayed to tend this machine,
And my furnace exploded, and I woke from this dream.
Woke to a burst of filthy hot gas,
Shrieking at me as the others hurried past,
Already tending to their own rusted boilers
As they tightened their bolts and squeezed at their oilers.
I raised myself up with my gray, callused hands,
Remembering existence was no fairy-land,
And hastened along the soot-filthy scene
Of solid buildings made of screaming machines.
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 Mitsukeru Furidomu · Mon Nov 26, 2007 @ 02:37pm · 3 Comments |
