embellished by a rising hallucinatory passion,
peppered with the mucous rattle of his breath.
On a morning born from nightmares he awakens,
no memory in his mind of how he came to sleep;
the congregation he has sought is all about him,
a flock of clever felines who walk upon two feet.
With the scraps of human tongue they’ve gathered,
they listen to his tales of the sacrificial son.
Here his faith is heresy, his form abomination,
he whets their appetites with his talk of blood.
As their paws and claws defrock him, pry the gold
from his hands, strip away his sacerdotal shreds,
his dreams take flight beyond a martyr’s death.
He envisions the pomp of his future consecration,
in the Holy City, a host of hosannas sung on high,
yet the fate he soon discovers is far from divine.
Bound by mutant skins, stained with mutant dyes,
he becomes a penitent before a graven shrine,
novitiate and servant to a pagan panther priest.
For visionary madness is familiar to their kind,
and they only devour the ones they cannot teach.
In the ghetto of Caracas you can see him every day,
an excommunicant, a derelict, a holy man some claim,
a strangely-tattooed apparition both hirsute and gray,
who preaches the imminence of a feline Second Coming
and sees the reborn Saviour as a bestial incarnation,
complete with taloned forepaws and the eyes of a cat.
A TRADER ON THE BORDER OF THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Bruce Boston
From my mobile station on the shifting border of the Mutant Rain Forest, I watch them come from the Northern Domes, from the slums and ghettos and the failed farms of the Wastelands, the lost ones eager to surrender to the Forest’s compulsions and the ones who tremble as if they are harboring a fear they must conquer. Then there are the religious ones, fanatics who come in groups. They think they are going to convert the creatures once-human who survive beyond the border, most of them already animal or vegetable in inclination and form. They think they are going to convince them to worship Jesus or Allah or Joseph Smith. Or the latest holovangelist.
I sell them satellite links that offer up-to-the-minute maps and weather forecasts for their implants and devices. How do I know if such maps and forecasts are accurate? I suspect the most accurate are far from reality. How can topographical maps on a holographic screen, shapes and lines and dots of color, even in three dimensions, portray the reality of crossing that same terrain? The searing climb of steep hills with muscles aching in calves and thighs, or the descent into valleys so deep and thick with growth you are plunged into a shadow world that your lanterns can’t penetrate. And you have to guard your life every step of the way.
Yet the visitors buy them, and contribute to my subsistence on this lip of coastal land the Mutant Rain Forest has yet to claim. All such voyagers into the chaotic green of the Forest are fools by my count.
***
There is still trade from the interior even in this savage land. I peddle native charms and potions as protection from the dangers one may encounter in the Mutant Rain Forest. I sell sachets from native plants, some of them extinct by now, for that happens swiftly in the world east of my station. Such talismans claim many things—to repel predatory animals and plants, to deconstruct the illusions of the shape shifters that mimic your friends and loved ones, who inhabit your mind with shadow images from the unconscious, or perhaps they are billed as an antidote to counter the deadly bite of red jacket wasps that can infest the spinal column with their larvae and make their victims dance to ghastly rhythms as if they were marionettes before they are devoured from within. The larvae gradually emerge as adult wasps from the human husk that remains, taking flight from ears, mouth, nose and empty eye sockets as they mature.
Do the jujus I sell work? I don’t promise anything. You would have to ask those who have tried them. I have never believed in such nonsense myself. Nor have I ever chosen to visit the perverted terrain that lies beyond my trailer to test their efficacy. All that I know is secondhand and that is enough for now. Sometimes more than enough. I have heard tales of horrible deaths and transformations within that world I will not repeat and that I don’t even like to think about.
I do not sell weapons. Archer was the one to go to for that. That faded blue trailer just opposite, five hundred yards on the other side of the clearing, the one aslant on two flat tires with the door canted open, that was Archer’s. Last I saw of him was one night at the cantina. We used to get together some nights to talk philosophy and women and just about anything. Archer was a good friend. Not that many in a lifetime.
That last night he was drunk and talking crazy, about how we must surrender to the Forest, how the Forest held the true destiny of the human species. Next morning he was gone. It didn’t take long for his trailer to be gutted by looters. There are no laws here to prevent such things.
***
From my station on the shifting borders of the Mutant Rain Forest I watch the fools return from their adventure, the ones who do. I sell them trinkets and souvenirs of their time here. Bizarre animal hides and skins, both fake and real, holographs and videos of Forest scenes they never experienced. The trade is always better when they first arrive. Most are too stunned in one way or another when they return, too self-absorbed to take any interest in souvenirs.
Some look shattered, as if the bedrock of their soul has been sledged by a hammer of the gods. Others seem to glow with religious fervor, many of the same ones who came to preach and convert now burn with the fever of a new faith. They have suffered and embraced revelations they must assimilate to continue with their lives.
There are others who have shut down all emotions. They wear a coat of body armor and their faces are expressionless. They are denying the changes that have been wrought upon them. Changes that wait in their brain’s recesses and the marrow of their bones. Some will deny them forever, always in conflict. Others will come back to the Forest and make it their home.
And what of those who do not return from their adventure? Dead or changelings, so I have been told.
***
As the Forest grows closer, as this lip of coastal land grows thinner and smaller, I know that my time will eventually come. Though I have never entered the Forest, I have lived too close to it for too long. Just like Archer.
Now I discover my thoughts returning more and more often to the Forest, and I am increasingly aware of the changes it has wrought upon me. The veins in my wrists, once blue, are now a greenish shade. There is a new surety and grace in my movements, a sense of balance that was lacking before. My vision and sense of smell seem more acute, as if the Forest is preparing me to survive within its borders. And I know that once the Forest claims the little land left to us, I too will become a fool like the others who have vanished into its depths.
So I wait until the time is ripe before I embark into those opaque walls of green entanglement, of death and transformation.
Though I have heard rumors of human tribes that still survive there, who have somehow made peace with the Forest and live in harmony with it. Perhaps I will find one of those to join. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll even find Archer.
PHANTOM LIMB
Frazier
Lost in the jungle wars
Against encroachment
His leg an empty space
Defined only by memory
Like a wild-hearted bird
Trained with sweet seed
The mutant forest repays him
Colonizes life back into limb
Reddish casting scarabs
Build bone from chitin
Their bug brethren form
Sinews of elastic wax
Flesh made of wingless bees
A skin of inte
rlocking mites
In this way he strides home
On the rebirth of his sole
THE REACH OF THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Boston
The emerald infestations stretch their tendrils
through sand and loam. Expelled from volcanic
vents in the impermeable interior of the forest,
they rise as fertile ash upon the world wind.
They flow with ocean currents and their high
flying particles stream through the stratosphere.
Microscopic flakes settle in the Mariana Trench
and dust the cold white peaks of the Himalayas.
They penetrate concrete, steel and the meat of
flesh. The planet becomes a plague zone that
thrashes and thrills in the verdant fever of
its disease. Rich in bravura, pervasive in the
claim they make on the world, the manifestations
of the Mutant Rain Forest insinuate their claws
and tentacles into civilization’s end, to inhabit
our lives and bestialize our lovers and friends.
CHILDREN OF THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Boston
Luiz
Born in the dense
and changing shade
of nature wilding,
perverse and surreal
in its beauty,
wherever I travel
on Earth or beyond,
the forest stains
my life and thought.
And when I sleep
safe in the shade
of civilization,
its rules and culture
and fashioned ways,
my youth returns
as a shadow dream
of emerald possession,
vital and protean
in its refrain,
darkly errant
as life unreined.
Maria
Embracing a belief
that casts the Savior
in a feline image,
she yearned to virgin
birth the Second Coming
as a bestial miracle.
Instead she has gathered
an army of urban strays,
longhaired and short,
alley to pure Siamese,
who roam her house
and cluster on her bed.
Steadfast in her fervor,
she sleeps naked beneath
a shifting coverlet
of ragged purrs and
velvet furs and claws
like thorns of faith.
Charles
He migrated from the
Chicago Dome still
green behind the ears
to discover another
variety of green
far more knowing.
He has never strayed
from the boundaries
of this wilderness
since falling prey
to its savage and
intense intoxications.
He lives in the moment
and sleeps with all
his senses alive.
You might find him
in a clearing
with knives in hand,
daubed like a native,
poised as a beast,
slaughtering some
vivid monstrosity
for its mutant meat
and mutant hide.
Kirtano
Come with me and
I will be your guide.
I will show you
tribes of albino lemurs
with iridescent eyes,
fire-breathing bats
and mushrooms that fly,
sabered panthers standing
sixteen hands high.
Do not be afraid.
These armored transports
are nearly invulnerable
Don’t mind the scales
that line my flesh.
They are not contagious.
But when I command you
to look away . . . obey!
It is not your body
that is in danger,
but your spirit
and your mind.
GENNA TAKES A LOVER
Boston
He has become the darkest star
of her erotic obsessions,
the critical mass beyond which
her personality can no longer ascend
or even express itself.
Whenever she considers fleeing
he launches the precise sensual bullet
that slaughters her resolve and
rushes her to new heights of excitation;
he is a grave incendiary of the flesh
who ignites her neural corridors
with undivided passion.
At first ashamed of the cries
that rise so freely from her throat,
at how her limbs thrash beyond control
beneath the artful invasions of his touch,
she has since learned to embrace her abandon,
to find a sure purchase on his slippery flanks,
to revel in the fluid guttural oh-so-foreign purr
of his lavish and fiercely whispered endearments.
And now that his supernal caress has transformed
both the substance and sanctum of her nights,
she knows that no mere human lover
could ever please her again.
FLOWER GARDENING IN THE MUTANT FOREST
Frazier
You weed out pretty annuals that
the strangler columbine will devour.
You fertilize with blood and marrow.
Your prize triffid at the center
wags its tongue constantly.
Grandma starts shouting at it.
She believes its clicks and clacks
to be messages from Uncle Pieter,
lost to the verdancy surrounding you.
Tomorrow, perhaps, Big P will
uproot and stagger about the plot,
making noisy sermons to all.
But today you welcome the acidic rains.
Some flowers wither and whine
like hyenas starving in a pack,
while others sway in absolution,
glow like lambent flames . . . a balm
to your obsessive green thumb.
GOING GREEN IN THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Bruce Boston
Evelyn was beautiful. Evelyn was never satisfied. She’d had lovers, more than a few, probably too many. She’d had children, but none the courts would let her keep. Not that she tried very hard to keep them. With a manic and indiscriminate dedication that left little room for children, she was always embracing one dire addiction after another: a worthless man, illegal drugs, the stim-wire, some futile fantasy dream—becoming a great artist or writer or holo star—dreams beyond her means or talent. She pursued each with all of her being until she became disillusioned or bored. Then she would discard them and move on to her next obsession.
It was her old friend John who convinced her to come with him to the Mutant Rain Forest. She’d slept with him a few times, couldn’t remember how many, but that was ancient history. Somehow they had remained friends over the years, perhaps because they were maladjusted to society in many of the same ways and had shared some of the same addictions.
One night John came to her one-room walkup in the Mission District. He told her about the Mutant Rain Forest, not that she didn’t already know about it from the holo. John promised her adventures and riches beyond her dreams. He couldn’t stop raving about the possibilities, his words spilling over one another.
Holding up one thin arm laced with old track marks, he told her he’d seen photos of diamonds and rubies as large as his fist. He either didn’t know or failed to mention that such jewels were invariably mutations of the forest that dissembled their true forms to ensnare unwary travelers.
Evelyn had just abandoned kundal
ini yoga—it made her back hurt and gave her headaches—so she let John’s wild-eyed rant seduce her. Besides, she felt ready for an adventure.
The pair took a tramp steamer south and debarked on the northern coast of what had once been Chile, where a lip of land remained the Mutant Rain Forest had yet to claim. There was a small human settlement here that catered to the needs of those who would venture into the forest. Ill-equipped with the meager provisions and weapons they could afford, Evelyn and John embarked upon their adventure.
Thanks to John, poor sad John, long since meat to some fearsome forest predator, it turned out to be the best decision of Evelyn’s life.
The Mutant Rain Forest welcomed her and she was immediately at home in its presence. As soon as she entered its borders, she began to feel transformed. Evelyn swiftly adapted to the forest and rooted there for keeps.
Now her pale green leaves, tinged with lavender and aquamarine, edged with needle-sharp spines, twine upward in graceful curves about a sinewy and milky stalk. When her scarlet flowers bloom, each reveals a miniature replica of her human face in its corolla.
Yet don’t look too closely or for too long, for hers is a visage insatiable to devour mammal or reptile, bird or insect. Her leaves will enclose you and her spines inject you with a venom that will slowly digest your body, flesh, bones and all.
Evelyn is beautiful. And Evelyn is satisfied at last.
AFTER THINGS FALL APART
Frazier
A rattling cadence of bone dry leaves
Her words flow in a stuttering stream
Her voice a wind fluting under dark eaves
She stands like Noah steering the Ark
Peering into some unknowable future then
Slumps against a giant ceiba’s rough bark
Her hand detaches and crawls to her feet
Releasing motes of shining black that
Drift airborne in the stifling heat
Imagine too beneath her skull of ants
A seething mass of green-gray matter
It commands by imitation and blind chance
When the rain batters her face of vapors
An insect swarm sloughs from her frame
She collapses top down like a skyscraper
Then rebuilds—a precise imago of my lost wife
CONSUMED BY THE SENTIENCE OF THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest Page 13