Epitaph in Rust

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Can sense it, their response is only in their frightened eyes.

The very breezes pick their way among the alleyways.

As if afraid of something in the gray December skies,

Or listening to the heartbeat of these hollow latter days.

Ride on, Messiah—there's no place for you behind the wheel.

You've come too late to sell your closing chapters, for our hands.

Have written us an epitaph in rust, on dusty steel.

We're pulled aside and served with debts and overdue demands

By angry, ragged shapes that once were us; and when we pay.

We'll wait in neatly ordered lines to sign our souls away.

—from the unpublished Poems of Rufus Pennick

"… but while in the east there rose from the radioactive ashes the empires of Erie, Allegheny and Carolina, the west remained broken up into independent, unorganized city-states."

There was really only one California imperialist in the twenty-second century—Ramo Alvarez of San Diego. Before he was 25 years old, Alvarez had extended his inherited kingdom to include the cities El Cajon, Chula Vista, Tecate and Tijuana… and Frazier Milliken's Journals testify that, as early as 2170, Alvarez was looking covetously north, toward the magnificent Ciudad de Los Angeles.…"

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