Dan's Poetry Archive

It is said on the night of July 14, 1948,
during an intense thunderstorm
over Chicago, Illinois,
lightning, attracted to the metal
of the mechanical looms, shattered
a skylight of the Karl Schneider
& Son Carpet Company factory
and stabbed into a vat of chemical dyes.
The uniquely ionized cloud wormed
its way into the nostrils
of all the dead bodies wrapped
in extraneous berber,

and every two-bit mobster
who had been rubbed out
and rolled up, international superspy
with blown cover and gunshot
wound, every grisly victim
of every uncaught serial killer
shuddered back to a semblance
of life in the throes
of an unspeakable hunger.

[The known information
about this incident comes
largely from the testimony
of a part-time night watchman
who reported narrowly escaping
the clutches of the marauding
reanimated corpses.

While corroboratory evidence
was discovered at the scene,
including remnants of decaying
biological material, no further
evidence was uncovered
outside the confines
of the factory. All police records
of the incident were destroyed
in an accidental building fire
in 1972, and the incident
has become somewhat
apocryphal.]