The dead are plodding through the empty streets

I am so, so scared of zombies.  I think this was the first poem I wrote this year in order to get over a nightmare.  My goal was to make a post-apocalyptic scene something really beautiful and sad, not necessarily terrifying.  I modeled it after poems studied in AP English and I really like it despite its macabre-ness.  

The dead are plodding through the empty streets,

Shuffling in despondent and lacking forms. 

Lidless eyes survey the neighborhood,

Searching for something, something mysterious,

Indistinct at the borders of their short comprehension. 

Harsh, hoarse attempts at communication ring mournfully from shuttered windows

And though pedestrians fill the street,

Not a soul may hear or answer. 

A parade of the damned,

Of the physical soulless,

One foot in the grave, the other on the front lawn,

Reaches from here to Main Street

And around the waist of the world. 

And everywhere is hunger,

In the rot of their flesh and stiffening of their joints,

Lying dormant in veins and saliva thick with the refuse of death. 

And the smell, the smell, the smell of life,

Of soft and supple things, intoxicating and inaccessible

Who have vanished into meaningless, dim, and fast relinquished memory

Or perhaps never did exist.

For all that remains on this autumn street

Are the dead with stale breath in their lungs and dull bewilderment in their slack faces

And damp leaves that swish under sluffing foot

And the forlorn, sturdy structures of mankind’s previous incarnation

Clinging to the struts of civilization from which all reason has decayed away. 

In the skeletal trees over unthinking heads,

Birds warble and wing, secure in their flight, untroubled by humanity’s change of state. 

And beneath them, the dead are plodding,

Through the empty, leaf-ridden,

Hellish streets.