HELLZAPOPPIN

A fireball of morning sun glints off my bronze Buddha.
His knowing smile suggests he’s having fun
sitting on my windowsill.

In a guttural voice, he utters:
All is impermanent.

My grandson reaches for my hand as we walk off to school.
Kids trail after mothers, who I’m surprised to see
still have buns of steel and Hollywood-style sex appeal.

It feels good to be alive in the merriment of a better world.
Teachers look like high school students who fly to work
on auto-gyros, wearing day-glow orange jump suits.

Everyone now lives forever.

Monkeys chatter in the treetops.
The sky is clear of suicidal planes, yet the Hemlock Society
sells suicide kits for those deemed not insane.

Cialis-fed men with perpetual protuberances,
no longer hobble on canes
as they bound like gazelles for topless ladies.

In a too-good-to-be-true atmosphere, a fleet of zeppelins appear.
They look like the Hindenburg of ’37,
or the Martian invasion forecast on the radio station.

Maybe it’s the much-ballyhooed biblical prophecy:
The end of this changing world.

MILTON