The Alphabet Poet, Excerpt from Yo, Taxi
By: Leon Wolf
Tags: Science Fiction, New York City, Post Apocalypse Fiction, New York, Post Apocalyptic

The Alphabet Poet, Excerpt from Yo, Taxi

I dropped a fare off at Tompkins Square Park. There he stood, the unparalleled street orator I had named the Alphabet Poet, based on his verbal style and location in the alphabet blocks east of 1st Avenue between Houston and 14th Street.

A towering, formidable, goateed, skinny, elderly, dark skinned man, with erudite vocabulary and precise diction. Think Bill Russell with dreads. He was dressed in a well-worn, clean suit, complete with vest and tie. Long, gray, matted clumps of dreadlocks hung like frozen time from under his giant hat to his waist.

Stray masses of dreads defied gravity and pointed toward the heavens. The Alphabet Poet stood on a milk crate, the hat on top of his gargantuan head of hair perched ten feet off the ground.

To start his performance the Poet spoke the alphabet with gravity and dignity, and stopped at his desired letter.

He pronounced two words which began with the target letter then proceeded.

The Poet recited in a slow, booming voice, with perfect enunciation, consideration, and simmering emotion.…A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O with each letter receiving its due, complete with individual intonation and pause.

A to O lasted two minutes, and made you wonder which letter is next. In the Alphabet Poet’s world, it was not a foregone conclusion that the familiar twenty-six must be in our expected order. Onlookers — the sight of the Alphabet Poet attracted an audience — watched him decide the correct letter to use.

At O he said:

Omnivorous, Overpowering

American Culture

Seeps

Into Every Corner

Of Our World

Like Oil

On A Seabird’s Feathers

Destroying It Forever

The Poet spoke with intensity. Each word a world. “Culture” alone took “five hard seconds and sounded like something you’d want to scrape off your shoe with a stick but couldn’t. “Our world,” made insensitive me want to weep for all that has been lost in the world. Tribes of people, animals, nature itself, unable to withstand the onslaught.

When the Poet finished, silence struck the busy street. The recital had drained him, and he sat on the milk crate to recover. The Alphabet Poet had no tip jar. He did not recite for money, but to express his heart and his head.

The Alphabet Poet provoked my brain.

His words made me visualize the wave of excrement we had spread around the world. Crappy movies, television, and other canned entertainment. Fake food and cheap, misspelled t-shirts. Loss of family and community in favor of incessant yearning and striving for more disposable junk. Look down at those who can’t keep up. Change venerable, irretrievable places into sad, weak imitations of us. A different world, but that is the way it was.

We Americans are — were — by nature a jittery people, eager to move without a moment’s notice. It’s our national origin story. People from the Indians onward faced arduous journeys head on. Confident, brave, and naïve enough to go all in for a better life in a new land far from home. Mercurial, me me me, forgiving, optimistic, powerful, compassionate America rooted for the underdog but adored a winner. We were the world leader in tornadoes, charitable donations, military might and the need to flaunt it. Life-saving surgery. Movies magnificent and horrendous. Fast food as a way of life with resultant obesity. Technological innovation and addiction. Percentage of the population locked away in prison. Second chances. Television viewing. Car theft. Use and abuse of new medications and old drugs. Both police and criminals. Divorce, gunshot deaths during routine family quarrels, frequent change of domicile, and pornography. Guns, cars and tits were the holy trinity of America.

We led the world in leading the world.

I’ll never forget America’s gifts to the world: basketball, the blues, jazz, rock and roll, hip-hop, movies, the Bill of Rights, the National Park system, American Standard bathrooms, and the dream of a better life. Good riddance to old ways. Newer and faster was the thing. We built it bigger and better, or bigger and worse, who cared in the end? Tore it down to do it again, even bigger. Invented the newest technologies, on to the next fad, move, move, across this open land. Wide open, once we took care of the Indians by destroying most and hiding the rest.

This is in the blood of our nation.

Most of all, don’t tell me what to do, motherfucker. I’ll say that right to your face, this is a free country. Was, was, the correct tense is was. Sometimes with my mental confusion and focus on the past it’s hard to remember that world is done.

The schizophrenic nature of America made sense. Enormous fuss about freedom in the Declaration of Independence, but twenty percent of the population had arrived in the storage compartment with the luggage and were still locked up. Those two details don’t jibe.

Say what you will, but white men thought blacks an inferior species, jungle bunnies, less than human. Fated to slavery based upon self-serving interpretations of the bible. Slave owners themselves in Africa and therefore up for grabs. Or plain shit out of luck.

The sad truth and bottom line is, slaves made white owners richer and their lives easier. But the same slave owners waxed poetic, on and on until the break of dawn, about men being created equal. Rights endowed by God, yada yada yada. How do you not have a nutty nation with that back story?

We were a nation founded on fine words written by Thomas Jefferson. Words justly memorized by generations of school children. Hold your head up and shout ’em from the mountaintop words. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

An exceptional man, that Thomas Jefferson. Wrote a document with universal appeal, but it’s only words. Back home on the plantation Jefferson owned 200 slaves. What can be more schizophrenia inducing to the national psyche than hypocrisy in the foundational documents?

Why dredge up the old world?

The new world began when scientists perfected robots to do the activities people don’t enjoy, and people didn’t allow the rich to keep them all. Soon, everyone had a robot or two, plus the billions that did the actual work of running the world.

Humanity had time to fulfill its destiny. Many funny videos of cats were created.

Robots perform household tasks, work the fields, transport food and people to any desired destination, collect garbage, repair streets, build more robots, comfort the lonely, and sexually gratify the horny.

Since Schembeckler made his move, robots outnumber humans 100 to one. The damn Brainiac killed enough people to serve his purpose: establish space and time for nature to recover and repopulate her bounty throughout the world.

Early on, after Doom, the first robots were awakened by survivors, then they were tasked with waking up more of their kind and spread the waking chain. Robots worldwide were ordered to walk the beaches and the nearby ocean floor, gathering skeletal remains. They piled them together in huge mounds eventually lit simultaneously around the grieving globe.

Now there is no conflict over resources. Worldwide, robots perform the functions essential to keep farms, big city infrastructure, wilderness sleeping lodges, ski slopes, and beach resorts up and running. So many are rarely frequented these days, but for now everything functions.

Sooner or later, I imagine some organized group of people will tell the robots to abandon vast swathes of the planet, as it is pointless to continue servicing them.

People amuse themselves with the excess robots. Robot football is very popular, as are recreations of Roman gladiator events.

Most of the robots have nothing to do and stand huddled together in mobs.

People have different robot needs. I need Chives. I wouldn’t last a day without him. People do as we wish. I’m too old to want to do much.

There are thirty million precious children, 95 percent under age six. The few older children were from unchipped families. Lots of Amish made it. The rest of us are unimplanted middle-aged contrarians, the elderly, and ancient ones like me. Now, three hundred million get the resources once shared by twelve billion. After years of grief, rampant insanity, suicide, and simple lack of desire to live, the new, depopulated world simmered down. Three hundred million survivors clung together for support, then spread throughout the world.

Life is terrible with the memory of devastating loss.

The survivors have become a society of moochers, plundering the houses of the dead. Until we use up the material goods of the dead, there is little incentive to produce more. I’ve spent most of my time since Doom visiting the homes of my dead friends and family. I find it comforting somehow.