Zombie 30/30, Poem 2

9/11 taught us that people
who go to work on time
day in and day out
are easy targets,
so maybe there's no excuse.

On outbreak day,
I requested the morning off
from The VA Hospital.
Had I not arrived at noontime
I'd be blaming myself.

A rattling table tennis game
of germs, of course they weren't
safe with the building warm enough
to lull you to sleep before lunch.

They pumped Florida all day long
no longer how long you set
your personal grates.
In the cold, mummies
could run circles around
zombies. In the warm,
my co-workers were finished.

That's how I knew zombies could run
under the right circumstances.
How fast I don't know, and I won't
be tasteless with jokes about
the speed of government workers,
but it was done damage by lunch.

Like a parable, the fast zombies
finished off everything
inside, not realizing they were ruining
their perfect ecosystem
through progress of speed.

I thought I was next,
but the zombies made their way
outside, and that was it
for their reflexes.

I made my way around them
to the inside, tallying packaged food
to be safe and fore-thinking
for once, catching the dates
on the junk food--the only food
in the canteen I trusted.

The dates presumed
we would survive the latest crisis
by at least two years,
though all I thought at the time
was maybe the end of the world
was starting because
we'd already left enough things
to outlast us.