TRANSMIGRATION

By Lee Clark Zumpe

Lee Clark Zumpe, an entertainment columnist with Tampa Bay Newspapers, earned his Bachelors in English at the University of South Florida. His nights are consumed with the invocation of ancient nightmares, dutifully bound in fiction and poetry. His work has been seen in magazines such as Weird Tales, Space and Time and Dark Wisdom, and in anthologies including Horrors Beyond, Corpse Blossoms, High Seas Cthulhu, and Cthulhu Unbound Vol. 1. Lee lives on the west coast of Florida with his wife and daughter. Visit: http://muted-mutterings-of-a-mad-poet.blogspot.com.

On that blistering October evening—

in the days of smoldering skies

when pale little ghosts foraged for food

in junkyards on the city’s fringes—

I enlisted with the multitudes

seeking out the supposed prophet.

We disfigured pilgrims quit our dwellings

amidst the fallen monuments

and, in sewer dungeons fouled

by fetid darkness and ageless filth,

climbing the dizzy stairways

of some crumbling old cathedral
     

whose long-dead worshippers

had doubtless found an apathetic god.

He spoke of the sanctity of technology

and of salvation through transformation—
     

the sparks of his divine machinery

danced above the roofless temple

beneath the swarming, callous stars.

I saw inappropriate shadows
     

congregating in the midnight streets below,

the moon sporadically glinting against

gold-anodized, aluminum alloy casings.

Sickened by the ghastly prospect
     

of forfeiting the residue of my humanity,

I recoiled in horror when his metal minions

began to harvest reluctant volunteers

to undergo radical reconstruction—
     

I fled as their appeals for clemency

drifted, unreciprocated, to the pallid twilight.

The prophet drives his drones, still,

amidst the ruins of this charred world.