Zombie-clumsy, zombie-slow,
    drained of all they used to know
    they're blind, blind as logs.

But ruin's so much easier than making or repair.
So you come home daily to a mystifying mess
(entropy and carelessness, you innocently guess)
for hours you mop and sweep despair,

tossing the rubble out on the heap.
Most days we still progress, to be fair,
but zombie relatives make progress creep.
Yet Ancestor havoc gets no blame!

Acknowledging ghostly home-wrecker fists
is beneath our male economists.
Like housework, they're a private shame,
though all of us quietly weep.

    Zombie-clumsy, zombie-slow
    Stripped of all they used to know
    They drain us to the dregs.

A lawyer came home at noon to get some folders.
As she unlocked her front door, an Ancestor rose:
a foul old matriarch, all jowls and shoulders
who slashed her cane at the porch, mutilating ferns,
missed the girl's face by a hair, shattering two urns.

I shiver. Will we too come back
as muscular ghosts, to whip and crack
and shatter--yet be dead
in all the ways that matter?

    Zombie-clumsy, zombie-slow
    hating all we used to know.
    Is this how we want to go?

Of course the dream was symbolic: how
habits learned when we were small
fracture all they can reach. Kapow!
We work so hard, then wreck near-all.

Eight steps forward, seven back. But, too,
Some relatives wrecking our homes are real!
Living, hating, blind. And what to do
about THEM? You got any clue?
I think my dream was a public appeal,

posing the problem for you as a test or
riddle: What stops a mad Ancestor?

    Zombie-clumsy, zombie-slow,
    robbed of all we used to know,
    can we bear to sink this low?
    Is this how we want to go?