40
Plentiful game in the Land of Zon,
but not a bite to eat.
All true vittles are dead and gone,
burnt by the brutal heat.
Lyla Lerrol takes a seat,
sucks on a tube in her suit
(refreshing here, this water),
but sweats still like a boar.
What sector Jor-El's projector
has taken her to meet
she knows not; but her quest
will not be but half begun
until she dons the rest
of her costume and blocks out the sun
that makes the Phantom Zone a sauna
where all the 'life' that lives
is flocks of meatless fauna.
Later, goggled and shielded, she surveys
the landscape. It gambols each way,
rolling postern to horizon,
Pre-Cambrian yet post-modern.
Metallic daffodils tower
over melted copper meadows
that loll to the gold-dust banks
of a lake of liquid lead wherein
iron-maiden fishes sink or swim,
their rusty scales scraping against
the nuts and bolts that keep their fins
attached. Birds of brass are being
hatched atop a tin can mountain,
whose craggy peak soars aglow
to scratch the amber sky
of an endless noon; while, below,
in the lush, litter-full valley,
there is room for iridium
insect swarms to hide from platinum
pelican predators, persistent
in their pecking away at every
onyx boot and shining silver slipper.
Clouds of soot spit clear acid rain
down on the decay, painfully
filling ruby rivers who rush
toward an opaque ocean to which
a wind has wandered, its hot gusts
raking at Lyla's back. She trusts
her mistress and their master and
inflates the lead-leaf raft they gave her
on the 'water.' The wind aft, she drifts.
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