Arrival of the Dreaded Body Snatchers by Dandelion Del La Rue

alice in wonderland

Arrival of the Dreaded Body Snatchers

The Body Snatchers
Have arrived
And won. I see around me
Countless plants
In human guise,
Giant philodendrons
Everywhere, attached to
Little boxes
Little brain supports
Staring into
Gizmos
Mesmerized
Zombified
Plantified.
What would Alice say?
Boringer and boringer
Perhaps.

What if Alice
Had an ipad
Instead of a boring book
With no pictures
Or conversations.
She wouldn’t have seen
The rabbit
Or fallen down the
Rabbit hole
Or drank from the drink me bottle
Or nibbled on the
Magic mushroom.
She might have
Thought, the roses were really red.
Wikipedia would have said so,
And she wouldn’t have
Noticed the cards
Running to and fro
With sloshing buckets
Of crimson paint.
She wouldn’t have heard
The wisdom falling from the
grinning lips of Cheshire cats
And caterpillars.
And Dorothy, of course,
Could have googled maps
And got to Kansas by the
Shortest superhighway.
She never would have
Met the scarecrow, or the
Lion, or heard
The munchkins sing.
She wouldn’t know
That she could melt a witch
Or dance on yellow brick roads.
She never would
Have stopped to smell
The poppies.

I’d rather be
An old human
Than a young
Philodendron.
I’m glad that I was young
Before the body snatchers
Came.