Kimberly L. Wright

Here’s a poem for a change, one I will not worry about publishing, so it’ll end up only appearing here. It’s a kind of old, abandoned one from when I was playing Fallout 3 and was haunted by taking a dark path.

Wastelander

I am a wastelander,
glowing with dangerous insanity
in clothes pried off imaginary corpses.

In postapocalyptic America,
a town made of aircraft parts and rusty strips of metal
harbored a undetonated nuke
in the middle of a pond created by the bomb’s impact crater.
Here madmen worshiped
the inevitability of violent recreation
a new reality of dust, sallow skin, crackling radiation.
Enormous, ravening rodents gnaw human flesh
in a world painted in several shades of brown grey black.
Meager civilization lives off debris scavenged
from a vaporized glory age ended in fire
the desire to win at all costs, future be damned.
Slavers prey on those lacking firepower.
Electronic nooses keep the property in check.
One wrong move — cranial explosion.
The wealthy hoard scraps, invite no one to sully their decaying tables.
And the walking dead remade by hellfire wait out
an unnatural long death as shunned skeletons with heartbeats,
abandoned like crumbling buildings of a long dead empire.
A remnant of mankind hides in silos sealed deep underground
ignorant of surface concerns,
radiation free but lost in private nightmares.

The undetonated nuke beckoned me
to give violent life to the death inside
exact unjustified vengeance on a pixel town
in an impossible alternate future
with a catchy kitschy retro Americana soundtrack.
This story a video game company team created
in a comfy office building somewhere.
I chose their dark path. From a safe distance away
I pushed the button and watched the blossoming glow
until my eyes burned
hell to pay just for destruction’s sake.

Glowing with dangerous insanity
in clothes pried off imaginary corpses,
I am a wastelander.