Zombies. yesssss! Go ahead,
ask me where I dug this one up..with new Adam Miller artwork Jan 03. 
(Click the pic for
RealAudio 12 min version by Renee Gromacki--uses 28.8
streaming audio) MP3?
It's 12 megs but free.
The dead walked through town again last night.
A glazed-eyed child trailed a toy and windless kite.
It stumbled, fell and crawled on twisted puppet legs
The soulless little one with its marching company of human dregs.
Despite that it once was buried.
The dead walked on in endless parade
Long lines of corpses spawned fresh by the nuclear spade.
Beings reeking, beings rotten.
We traced their rebirth to some unholy crater, and from there down our mid-Nevada desert trudging,
A hellish, improvident accident of nature, warped, hungry, dead, but somehow free of God's judging.
Falling and stumbling, advancing town by town, propelled by no earthly power.
Filling, then feeding from great and bloody writhing sacks, slung on backs unbent
The sated dead ever walked, passing us by; the still hungry, ranging for our scent.
We've heard every open basement and attic creak with sounds that killed.
Desperate, ignorant us, trailed by unholy sounds of shuffling feet--
From all sides they came at us, suited and shrouded armies, marching to an insistent beat.
We pulled back our tired and wounded guard, home by home.
Our hideous life here called for new rules for a survival game.
Rules that changed to stall our final surrender--like diverting them to our lame.
And stifled our dreams
Until awakened by the dread
Of being eaten, alive and abed,
Came closer and closer, day after day,
To make ourselves resemble our foes in every way.
I could now easily dread my own, possessed, evil laugh.
But we surviving decided to fight on, in this tug 'o war little Jerusalem
Handily exhausting every sane way to wall, delay, or divert them.
Their eyes stolen and hearts hammering with wonder and fear.
There was an unstoppable magnetism that drew the little ones to the killing ground.
In numbers too big to save them all, our heads bowed, watching them go down.
They ripped their victims flesh, tearing out the young lives' spark.
Inexorably drawn to our town borders,
Heeding some laughing devil's abominable orders.
While our "negotiators" lie bone-dried in the sand.
By now we think the devil is bored, just toying with us in our rubble
Undoubtedly expecting us to succumb after days of struggle.
And the muscular swing of the machete is hardly new.
The town streets weeded over and went to dust.
And the wretched dead stole the salvation hope of any resident God we trust.
Is to fight the devil until we fall far and near
Under numbers and momentum we now know we cannot stall.
There's nothing that remains at all
Of your sanity at first glimpse of your loved one's still bright red blood,
Skull cracked open--leaking fat and
spongy tissue mud.
Our final strategy is simple yet staunch:
We human dregs have an insane defensive-offense to launch
We were committed to scorch the very ground, and black the sky above.
In my house I walk from room to room, wondering about life, if this's what's left of all I love,
Then what's the sum required to make it worthwhile to survive,
When all are dead, and all is lost, yet I remain alive--
And the last posse ride would never leave any of us the same
We now look them in the eye, ugly to the point of physical pain
We chop and cut with nothing to lose and the devil's side nothing to gain.
Somewhere, there must be easier prey.
After all, only the hardest won faiths attract
An ever-advancing evil, ever-seeking to distract
From the simple truth that our choices are to hold to a path already beaten,
Whether true or false, or literally, succumb as faithless and be eaten.
It's a fevered act of bloody red revenge to rend the shapes
That climb to meet us in our daylight nightmares on the breaks.
Driven by the need to eat our wet electric life and move
It's the devil's puppetry turned down a blood lust groove.
We affirmed again to sacrifice the last of all we loved best.
We few summoned our own devils, and schemed our intruders' demise--
Pulling from a bottomless well of revenge, an insane hate that can no longer surprise.
But on they came, ignoring the pain of their own baying, screeching senses.
While their advance and destroy orders rang from the unholiest of thrones
Until silenced by our earth-moving, killdozing charge that jellied their bones.
Now litter a dead-town spent worthless by a desperate pact and ruling.
The world watched and reported our "delusional" fight against death in reverse
Leaving us to fend for fleeting victory at the highest cost and a death even worse.
To fend off hell with foe-matching insanity, our minds wrecked and bent.
The roar of the straining engines and screech of the jammers' clutches.
The black, sweet-acrid diesel smoke of the tractors showed such as
A never before heard hell-bent, echo-rolling, ground-gear thunder as roared from those steeds.
With turbo squalling Cats and eighteen-wheeler cabs red-lined for one time only speeds,
We churned our stumbling foes under the wheels and grader-blades of certain final death
Until no trace remained of that spewing crater's foul inhuman breath.
Always opt for self-inflicted fear.
For when the real fright comes across your land,
And keeping life and limb are outcomes doubtful and grand,
Don't say you weren't given warning, or be laughing fools,
There are things, out there, that can mock your hardest rules.
Take it from me, the worst of all,
Is fighting back, when your own dead come back to call.
