Member Poem

Sue’s Odd Experience

 

Waking at dawn, you stretch and yawn

   and note your nightgown’s duller.

And what’s with the sheet and the socks on your feet?

  They’re not the usual color. 

 

You drive to your place of work, and face

   a door, expecting to see

your name, which is Sue. But the sign says, “Lew.”

   Where could your office be?

 

It’s on the next floor up. Perplexed,

   you enter the room and freeze.

Why can’t you place a single face,

   each looking ill at ease?

 

Now back at your flat you see your cat

   which died six weeks ago;

and your ex is here, the guy last year

   you kicked out in the snow.

 

Soon it’s night. You peer at the light

   of the stars and wonder why

you can’t discern, in the sky’s nocturne,

   Orion or Gemini.

   

So what do you do on a world that’s new

   yet old as heaven and hell?

Stay out of trouble and ask your double

   who lives just parallel?

 

You run and run until the sun

   starts glowing in the west.

The west? No! No! This crazy show

   is making you distressed.

 

But there, beside you (come to guide you?)

   stands your doppelgänger.

Look at her choppers! Those teeth are whoppers!

   You’re tempted to defang ’er.

 

And so a battle starts to rattle

   all of hyperspace.

She tries to bite, but you grapple and fight

   until the interface

 

disappears and all the gears

   of space-time come to a halt,

the cops arrest your twin in jest,

   for there’s been no assault —

 

but you’re in jail. Can’t pay the bail.

   Two guards are guarding your cell.

In a couple of hours a fiend devours

   your body, as if it fell

 

into a maw which opened, “Ah,”

   and you’re free-falling, falling,

dropping, tumbling. Who’s that mumbling?

   In the raw and sprawling:

 

your body. And a kindly hand

   is pressing a damp cloth

against your head. You’re on a bed.

   Like the fluttering wings of a moth

 

your eyelids twitch, then open. “A glitch

   in the app, but now it’s better.”

Yet will it last? Or will you be cast

   in another saneness shredder

 

where the zeros and ones, the atoms and suns,

   and the minds of you and Lew,

alert or in slumber, are nothing but number

   to leave you without a clue?