where have all the good Dales gone...

Jeffrey DeMunn as “Dale” from The Walking Dead via AMC ©

simple songs for what losing it all, gains ( an ode to ‘The Walking Dead’ )

with a jaw harp serenade

this is how I remember things

singing happy birthday to myself

holed up in someone’s house I will never meet

one hundred and eighty odd days since death

as a new form of life began its providence over humanity

at first, it was driven by mysterious amoebic dysentery

pharmacies running out of iron pills and such

soon the fevers followed, every minute was filled

with the dearly beloved we have gathered here today speeches

sorrow became commonplace, paranoia crept up to thin the masses

of their morality and there were less and less mourners by the day

pretty soon, nobody knew who was who, was the opening line

to the daily conversations of backhoe tines, funerals and graves being dug

I did not know anyone who came back, I had heard stories

on the radio about flesh eaters who were not people anymore

but were part of some algorithmic bloom pattern foretold by the CDC

this was a seemingly unstoppable disease and a not so neat

and tidy ending to the great American novel dream

the blood horde swept down the East coast

ran along highway 95, fanning out onto the asphalt arterial structures

that fed urbanity's reach into this great land of trees

once, we were what you would call cavalier and pioneer

desperate to make it work, but we got top heavy and bottom hungry

playing around in the sandbox as if we were going to be God

there were always going to be a Pandora to blame

there was always going to be someone held accountable

for how untamed mutagenic warfare became

there were always going to be more resources to claim

there were always going to be cures to the blues of humanity here

but one day the newscasts went static and tanks lined up

and the outsides of secure facilities went idle

all those short wave radio enthusiasts said a-ha we were right

and that was the day I knew I had to start giving

all my perspective back to what I thought I had gained

insects and animals, seasons and weeds

vines and leaves with nary any hamburger in sight

save for the disemboweled stranger stuck in a forever plead

of mercy, eaten on the outside of some locked lost kingdom

medical science practices got smaller and smaller

disappearing into unseen museums behind walls

we had, almost at once, put back all our hope to the wind

we came here, crossing oceans trying to find something

that was better than all of what we had experienced before

dizzy from trying to fill memory and music with how

we once reached beyond the horizon for something

to fulfill our destiny when we came here

from our very distant flat world view

we once reached with love, we once reached love

we once, we once did many things besides fall

EJR ©