Pole Vaulting on the Sun

Going to the Motor Base

poems one and two in order of appearance

Six empty cartridge shells
drop out
as lifter presses extractor
raising it from its seat in the cylinder

Rillian,
resting on a dead man’s
chest,
collects the empties
for resale value

Can’t be a man,
if you can’t afford to eat,
his mother drilled home,
daily ’till her death

And Rillian to his fellows
crows,

“I’ll head out there at sunset;
If any of you weasel-necked
spud-eaters wants,
you can come along”

Rustling of dead leaves against
the rocky ground

until,
a dried-out prune of a man,
named Middle,
shouts,
“If I throw in with you,
what’s in it for me?”

“Let’s see, my good uncle,”
comes Rillian’s reply,
“What’d you get last mission?”

“Seems I remember,
you had
two hands
prior, and
one hand
after”

On a sudden chilling breeze,
a collective groan
fills Rillian’s pause

Pressing on,
“You managed to kill
twelve men,
snag a working gold
pocket watch,
so be better today
than you were
yesterday,
lad”

At this,
the entire crew
squeals juvenile
laughter,
haunted with coming
death,

all rolling around
dry leaves, and
kicking boot heels
high

Even Rillian,
captured in clatter,
jigs violently on
the dead man’s
chest, and
jingles his empty shell
casings

Then,
business boiling up
again,
he
rallies hard

His “Yellow Boy” repeating
Winchester rifle barking
a history of weaponry
in one sharp word,
echoing for eternity

Their war song
sings out:

“We’re going to the
Motor Base,

We’re gonna kill
some folks,

We’re going to the
Motor Base, and

after everyone’s all
bloody and dead,

We’re gonna take us
their stuff and gold

We’re gonna dance
on their corpses

until there’s nothing left
until there’s nothing left

Oh, we’re going to the
Motor Base, and

We’re getting it on!”

~^~^~^~^~

Our Meat Boys

A story of the near present

Prologue:

When you’re hungry and soil is rubbish, cows mad, chickens burning with flu, and fish dead gone, eating your fellow humans is less taboo and more a matter of time. Time to hack, saw and slice.

For after one or two generations of desperate need and deeds done in terror… the young and hungry won’t see what all the fuss was about. They’ll see a leg, a thigh, a breast; a lean cut, a rump roast, or a delicacy of eyeballs and blood-stewed kidneys.

•~•~•

“An army survives on its belly.”
– U.S. Civil War, Anonymous

Here,
in the rain stain,
reminiscent of the last great storm,
north of ancestors’ decayed paradise,
the only class to live
above the earthly dirt,
outside the physical pain,
is the Tidal Barons.

They’re the Meat Merchants
of the Motor Base. They control
the selecting, the herding, and
the processing of body slaves.
If a guy’s got a craving, a guy’s
got to pay at the base.

“Your mind is yours, but your flesh belongs to Us.”
– the Tidal Barons

Back~with~Rillian~on~the~road

Rillian, of the earthly dirt
but not the common cloth,
heads balls out
hindbrain out
cocked guns out
with Middle, Tip, and the rest
riding his wake
to the Motor Base main gate.

It was the bloody cruel loss
of Rillian’s blood-tied family
to lackeys of the Tidal Barons;

It was the senseless and bloodless
apathy of his fellow man,
too numbed to stir
in their own defense;

It was these external motivators
mixed with his regret-fueled need
to
be
better,

that primed his pump and
charged his cells.
Forward!

As for the rest,
Middle, ‘member him? A one-
handed man-killer, our destroyer
of the ever-present enemy,
a demigod of bullets and boots,
but a man all the selfsame;

he and his brother Tip need
to eat meat. All our killers
need meat. It drives their cells
forward!

Back~at~the~Motor~Base

Maidenhead,
captain of the multi-guard,
her radiation-brown skin shouting:

“Fuck your weak understanding of humanity! Ugly is skin deep; beauty is my blood and marrow and viscera.”

She squints from the capstan,
overlooking the main gate,
chewing on her spiced jerky
like bed springs compressing
then reluctantly releasing
under a prostitute’s routine
action atop another John.

Swallow, a burning in her gut,
tells MH something is coming;
all her remaining nerve endings
raving:
Make fast the gate!
Ready thy forces!

Maidenhead signals the trolls
to dump the vats. All along the
heavy main gate, below her,
MH’s lounging Ant Boys scurry
to their needled feet.

The vats tip and release
red darkness flowing over
the wood and stone barrier:

A rush of heads to the blood,
the Ant Boys greedily lap
the sticky red motivational
treat, Blood of Man,
from every timber.

Maidenhead squints from the
capstan, ready and willing.

Rillian~at~the~Main~Gate

And Rillian yells,

“Beyond this gate, death awaits! Will it be ours or theirs? One thing. One thing above all else. Find and kill Lady Tidal. She falls, they all fall!”

And Middle shouts,

“I’ll fuck that bone lady. She’s got Picasso face. She’s the high king of meat.”

Tip and sundry are overcome by
laughter as they stomp boots.

And then Rillian’s boys sing:

No more safe happy places,
not in our deepest deep,
not in our shining heaps;
the Motor Base is ahead,
the pain will be brought
double, triple, quadruple;
we’re gonna kill some folks

No more safe happy places,
not in our deepest deep,
not in their bloody heaps,
but it will be done,
the Motor Base taken.

Epilogue:

There’s a sense of full circle birth life death in every bite; each breaking down of the flesh with our very own teeth is the birth of another soul but not separate and lost, a part of us and everything — a fleshy encapsulated universe tying us … one to another.

Our meat energy joins with others when each body dies, is consumed, and this is good.

The End

More Motor Base Adventure to Come

Soon, Dudes