Zorgamazoo by Robert Paul Weston Page A

tip of her shoe,
and clambered inside, then vanished from view.
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    Down through a passage, she quietly sneaked,
while in every direction, machinery creaked.
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    The farther she went, the passages shrank,
the workings grew cluttered and dingy and dank,
but still she pressed on, going all in between
the wires and tubes making up the machine.
    She finally came to the end of the road,
to a nexus, where all the machinery flowed.
There, she encountered a mountainous sphere:
An incredible orb that was perfectly clear.
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    It rose from the floor like a planet of glass.
It was filled with an almost invisible gas .
The gas had the color of moldering cream,
and Katrina knew then: this was Tedium Steam!
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    She took a step forward, approaching the sphere.
It loomed overhead, looking bleak and austere.
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    She spotted two wires, two cables, two cords,
that sprung from the floor and went curling towards
the base of the sphere and its silvery glass,
where they linked to the bottom, with fittings
of brass.
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    Seeing them there, something clicked in her mind
as she looked at the way the machine was designed.
Those wires , she thought. They are the way
of solving our problems and saving the day!
    She took off her bag, slipping out of the straps.
She opened it slowly, unzipping the flaps.
Inside was a clutter, a jumbled array,
of all she’d collected since running away:
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    The spring that had come from a grandfather clock,
the one she had used to jimmy the lock…
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    Some strips of the sheet that had flapped like a cape,
when she’d leapt from her window to make her escape…
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    There was also a knife she had grabbed in a flash,
from the hair of that bully, Selena the Slash…
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    There were pebbles and stones,
from the Tunnel of Hush,
she had caught when they fell
in that plummeting crush…
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    She had even acquired some slippery slime,
the oiliest, goopiest, greasiest grime.
It had come from the tongue of the Octomabot,
and clung to her bag like a dollop of snot.
    Using the knife from Selena the Slash,
she proceeded to sever, to mangle, and gash.
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    Then with the pebbles and some of the rocks,
she scraped and she hammered
with scratches and knocks.
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    The spring—it was twisted and given a flip,
so its coil became more of a fastening clip.
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    With all of these items, she fiddled around,
using all of the various things she had found.
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    At last, when her curious work was complete,
she tied it all off with the tatters of sheet,
and sealed it like glue with the gunk that had hung
from the Graylian robot’s mechanical tongue.
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    Then she stood back, her eyes going wide.
Something peculiar was starting inside…
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    At the heart of that shimmering, luminous sphere,
a new kind of vapor began to appear.
    It started quite slow. At first, just a puff,
from one of the tubes that was pumping the stuff.
A new kind of gas was replacing the old,
and the new stuff, in truth, was a sight to behold!
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    Inside of the glass, to Katrina’s surprise,
was a music, it seemed,
    Meanwhile, outside of the Boredom Machine,
the battle was growing ferocious and mean.
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    The creatures of Earth, the zorgles and all,
were locked in a brazen and barbarous brawl:
There was hair being wrangled, eyes being poked,
toes being twisted and throats being choked!
Morty and Winnie were taking their lumps!
The sphinxes and griffins were covered with bumps!
The dragons, the yetis, the phoenixes too,
    the pixies and fauns and the Gillygaloo,
were lost in fracas of wallops and bonks,
of punches and pummels and clobbers and clonks!
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    But in spite of their vow that they never would quit,
in spite of their bravery, gumption and grit,
they were starting to tire, losing their hopes,
like a boxer, pinned down, his back on the ropes.
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    The Octomabots, they too could surmise,
with the ominous gleam in their ominous eyes
that the battle was finally taking its toll,
and now was their