MECHA GODZILLA LOVE POEM
When I think of you, I’m actually
thinking of a distillation of organs.
Livers, kidneys, vessels
through which blood flows
like the dappled leaf shadows
whose shifting I never saw
because I spent my summers alone
in basements wondering if bugs
have hearts or even lungs.
No one knows. God is dead.
Society crumbled so we built
a giant robot and launched that baby
to space to do battle with a species
of cricket-sized aliens, because
we need triumphs now more than ever,
no matter how small and scurrying they be.
It’s like this morning when I took
a beer instead of Tylenol, vanquished
a whole day before it even started.
To the liver it’s all the same,
mere surges in the gut, and in fact
I often mistake bowel quivers for love
and you my lover for your evil clone.
Because what is a robot anyway
but an overgrown insect? What is
a heart except a collapsing colony.
What are you if not the shore
upon which I may finally crash,
take stock of myself, and formulate
a world worth worshipping.
DECODED TRANSMISSIONS FROM THE BILLION-POUND UNDYING JELLYFISH DRIFTING AT DEPTHS UNKNOWN
The bottom of the ocean is
a terrible place to go
blind. This sadness is
a millipede without legs.
This sadness weighs
a billion pounds and smells
vaguely of plastic.
Like an alien mothership,
like a floating homeless
continent of garbage,
it cannot be detected by radar,
it will not biodegrade.
Call this an evolutionary
advantage, call it
biological immortality.
If you keep yourself
a sponge, you can never
truly be crushed.
HEDGEHOG’S DILEMMA
People move through a city feeling
paper-y, like origami,
feeling distinctly fake and fucked.
When they speak bats fly out:
the orthodontists suggest braces.
It’s not so much that the town froze over
than it is everything grew a shell.
Somewhere a scientist in the arctic
goes insane from his forbidden research.
He has built an army of mutant moths
and six-foot tall praying mantises;
unleashed they boil the sky green.
People shudder to think,
shutter their windows
and slug 18-racks in darkness.
There’s been some sort of mistake,
they’re pretty sure, a misunderstanding.
To what exactly are the mantises praying?
And after all is said and done
and these insects have destroyed
everything, preparing then to re-colonize
earth, how can they expect to hold
one another tenderly
when their hands are blades?