Earthworm
My mornings come fraught with bushwhackings
and darkness. Speechless and blind, the rewards
prove inadequate: the never-ending
mouthfuls of filth. A pear-shaped brain. Fulllength
shits and five sludgy slow-motion
hearts. No fun ever, just a frantic week or so
fucking in the leaf litter, rubbing my clitellum
against a few hot pink girl worms
who’re really not girls because
we’re all hermaphrodites. For what? A gooey
sac of dirt-colored offspring? By the thousands
we die, drowned in our tunnels or fried
on the sidewalk, reduced to the stench and sorry
skid marks of our frizzled curlicue
bacon-rind carcasses. Or else the robins get us,
tilting their dimwit Tyrannosaurus Rex eye and
listening for our labors, appetite
on appetite, gobbled up by a paunchy old World.
Drunk in Bed Reading a Magazine Article about Australopithecus
A squirrel-brained, dog-toothed walker-about,
something the lug-toothed cat
dragged in. Scavenged, squashed, fossilized,
gully-tumbled, tweezed
and toothpicked. Hello Mom. Nothing’s left
to coax her down from: a sliver of ape girl
pelvis, the leftovers
from her prototype ankle, a theoretical thumb.
Every crumb demolishes a theory and Eden’s
mucky green is frizzled
to an Ethiopian hardpan gulch. And a wormy,
fly-blown, beetle-browed mutt got
to be our ancestral God-lit, ass-dragging Eve…
The Alligator’s Rebuttal from a Florida Golf Course
My gizzard’s stuffed with customized Callaways and Titleists
forsook by hackers chunking from the rough
only to plink off my saurian scutes. Who says
you can shoot? You can’t: I’m tolerated and coddled if only
to amuse you, even as your balls unspool in my gut. Dignity
is a luxury; I’ll eat anything you hit my way. I’m a gobbler
of the world’s manufactured crap: an inside-
out umbrella flapping across the 7th tee like a fucked-up bat,
or the driver I dredged from the water hazard
after another white-shoe tantrum. With bucktooth fangs and
an insincere smile I divot the greens, decapitate
the sprinklers and foul your bunkers. I shit your pools black
and churn the pond with its blob-faced koi
into a bloody pink froth. You curse the mornings I decimate
your ornamental ducks dibble-dabbling
off the clubhouse deck. Quack! Quack! they plead, moments
before I yank them under. You’re next! I bellow at suntanned
cougars and khaki-pants duffers, dragging my
filthy fat tail through your flowerbeds. I yawn at your yippy
ratlike dogs, my mouth as puffy and white
as a coffin’s lining. I despise your efforts to ape a carnivore
with refrigerated gobbets on the end of your fork. You laugh
at how I walk – elbows-out and belly-up – whenever I traverse
the fairway. Ha! I was absolute yellow-eyed
appetite sixty million hungry years before
you were even halfway to monkey. I used to jerk you stooped
half-bald grunters out of the cattails. Frogs put up a better fight.
Triumph of the Human Genome at Hilton Head Island
Darwinian splendor goes by in a bikini so I say Achtung!
Perfection! Her boyfriend is the Missing Link, his thick
brow puckered in thought like the first stooped
knuckle-dragger with wits enough to shuffle towards
the delicious greeny high ground, away
from the stupidity of starfish and sea cucumbers, away
from the petroleum gunk of our primordial
amphibious beach. My gills peel away like old scabs!
My flippers curl into thumbs! My brain is gargantuan!
They’re such hot mammalian chuff, bipedal binocular
death-machines scanning the horizon’s
dazzling blue-white stripe for something good to eat,
for someone else even more spectacular to
screw, their tanned ankles bearded in foam and hanks
of miserable seaweed, feet crushing
the worm-drilled hinges of seashells bleached white…
Ah, the ocean’s tragic persistence. What is this stuff?
Trilobites’ husks granulated? Dead
sailor’s teeth? Octopus ink drizzled over wrecked
U-Boat slag? Not even God bothers to count disasters
here, the catastrophes and eons spent
to finalize our evolution. Look at my feet, surf-dabbled
and burnt pink: such fierce fret of tendons! I kick apart
the bells and brains of a dozen washed-up
jellyfish, unafraid of postmortem stings. Such idiocy!
Hopeless! But you guessed right: we will never budge.
