pollen mouth

The year is 1276.  My infant consciousness wills itself into an endless existence.  Even as a baby lacking the mastery of my mind and body I know to invoke the variety of immortality that suffers no susceptibility to death.  The vampire dies beneath the rising light.  The werewolf withers from bullets of silver.  But my being, purposely impenetrable, knows no potential for corruption.  Not because of any rapid wound healing or instinctual defensive aggressions.  If fist, weapon, or contagion approached while paired with hostile intentions, my tongue would flutter, then bellow out from my mouth a ball of light, and reduce all within its radius to pollen.

Like newborn muscle, like the canal at the end of a baby’s bowel, my protective power, that could turn a bolt of lighting into a cloud of powder, surrenders to a similar involuntary control.  Deaths are inevitable.  First a beetle, then a spider, then I disappear forever both my mother and my father, together with the neighbors, who are numerous and too curious to be apathetic towards a residence where people never exit only enter.  From the center of my navel to two hundred meters in the distance, stopping at the town’s circumference, is a wasteland whose past inhabitants now take the shape of powdery pyramids beside an innocent, smiling infant.

My growth is slow.  Half a century passed before bone replaced fontanel.  The year is 2176.  Nine hundred years has placed me in the midst of adolescence.  A feral child with poor jurisdiction over bodily functions is now a veteran who turns to dust the unjust with skill and precision.  I am the infamous invincible, a heroine, host to unrivaled virtues, celebrated by all the world’s people, a killer of the worst criminals.  Elected by the populace to dismiss those who resist peace and cooperative progress.  In the aftermath of a murder, or any harm derived from one and done to another, my tongue would elongate, weaponize worldwide rays of sunlight to seize and disintegrate society’s most insufferable subjects.

Like lip-gnawing hunger, like the air-lust of a lung submerged in water, my desire to expire the foulest amongst the living surrenders to an appetite that now includes all varieties of human being.  Deaths are impartial.  The young, old, healthy, and sick are all susceptible.  The sinful and religious exist equally defenseless when I empty, simultaneously, the cities, countries, and continents.  Condense the action of extinction down to a single moment.  I extend the devastation to include everything designed by the mind or hand of a human.  As if swallowed up by time they are denied an Earthly presence along with any evidence of a previous existence.

The year is 3076.  Alone on a planet of perfect conditions I witness the synthesis of a new branch of human evolution.  An equally verminous cultivation.  Babies birthed from impossible sources of gestation.  Head first out of the earth.  Feet first out of the ocean.  Face first out of the glaciers.  Spine first out of the mountains.  Billions sprout in rows and columns.  The upright pelvis, hairless epidermis, pair of opposable digits, unmistakably human.  With unprecedented persistence the resilient Homo sapiens’ spirit resurfaces.  A solitude is removed from permanence by piles upon piles of blossoming infants.  A previously unknown peace is released like food exiting a stomach.

Like euthanizing a rabid animal, like exiling the sick to avert an epidemic, killing the seedlings of a species repopulating is both necessary and immoral.  But it was only natural, from my conception to maturation, to undo what had been done by nature, to alter accepted collective culture, instinctively in search of fewer numbers.  It is when pressed upon the chests of too many others, when companionship is the irritant that breeds conflict, the suffocated soul erupts violently, sacrifices the intimacy of the colony and casts off on a canoe of silence towards the isle of self-sovereignty.  While perched on the moon I part my lips only slightly.  Sunlight pools on my tongue.  I exhale.  Earth bursts into a cloud of pollen.

evolution

I

It always begins with her inventing new ways of being, then behaving in those ways, then accepting the consequences for being unpredictable as there is always some starved variety of human insecurity somewhere in this world searching for something to pin down under its feet and feed on.

II

The odor invaded the noses of the neighboring population.  Thousands of nostrils were saturated with the sour sweat of the modification.  She unstuck the stick of her skin, restructured the encasement, then slid back inside the fresh hide that now took the shape of something inhuman, something resembling an antelope, but prehistoric and reptilian.

She couldn’t have predicted the smell.  The unpleasantness of egg dissolved in molasses that drifted into the distance and beckoned anyone curious closer.  What had been an intimate operation, a private unpeeling and resealing with no arranged invitations, had become a full-blown circus exhibition for those in the background still postured on two feet.

She would have imagined it differently.  Interrupting this first-of-its-kind encounter should have been a more obvious imbalance of power with the law of the land siding with the life most susceptible to sudden adaptation.  Her quadrupedal posture, hyper-sensitized fight-or-flight animal nature, nine hundred pounds of jawbone bite pressure, all seemed to transcend her superior once liberated from the body and behavior of her former species.

There was no precedent.  No narrative passed down through the generations that explained to each successive cluster of unknowing children how best to habituate with beasts bred from blood not unlike their own.  There was only the guttural thrust of instinct that cautioned against more unfortunate times when limbs got tangled in the teeth of dangers unidentified.  Like their ancestors they carried their wisdom behind the navel and above the rectum.  While the modernity of their minds and bodies suggested the delicate approach of diplomacy, a more ancient system of nerves and adrenaline fought the fight against free will and won.

When there wasn’t much left to be desired, no novel shape to take in hopes of being renewed, improved, inspired.  When the wind swept up the intolerant scent of them into the aperture of her intuition she licked around inside her mouth, felt the roof, then tapped against her last human tooth, a lingering anatomy, that leaked the cement taste of civility before being pushed up and out from the root.

The individual became a collective, the collective selected a leader, the leader provided direction, tension thickened into action, and she witnessed, without resistance, verdict and appropriate punishment become the heart of this uncompromising moment.  Their crude tools pierced into her chest.  Her teeth wrapped around some anonymous human neck.  No omniscient observer could have known who was more primitive.

III

It always ends with her propped up on top of a cloud, or hanging on to the underbelly of the moon, or the nude backside of her body welded to the surface of a star.  It is always some celestial awkwardness.  A figure bent over into herself with her face resting on her knees, loosely cocooned, adrift in the heavens, hoping to land on something soon.  Something soft, or metallic, or red-hostile-volcanic, something as odd and alien as her abandoned humanity.

like a whale

I

I spent an hour becoming electric, a year embracing the engine, a decade honing the labor for the breach (limbed-eggshell exit).  I wanted to be removed from the body.  I needed an expedition, a gaseous exploration of the milk of heaven without the wired cage of rib

and skeleton directing me back to form.  I limply ascended into the rotations of the atmosphere.  Each layer of its worldly breath combed methodical.  Every stroke removing a different system.

The skin released like cellophane.  The vessels untangled.  The muscles slid off the slippery bones and the bones broke infinitely into dust.  Each organ floated on the weight of its importance, all eventually returning to the surface.

II

and earth parts as incision, breaks, bleeds for implantation, and a kidney folds into the soil to sprout roots that navigate the underground landscape like an addict licking at ecstasy, choking sleeping crops that willingly award their flesh to the growth—a glutton

collecting dead colonies and extinct species until there’s nothing left and it adopts the pulse of its sibling heart rotting in the branches of a tree outside a town devoid of electricity as the planet is drained

and the humans fall four-legged and foam at the mouth, encrust themselves in their drippings, harmonize with the apocalyptic song of behavior, as all purpose abandons culture

except the life now being pushed up from under, birthed renal from the urine-soaked soil, at the peak of realization, the body abundant, the wounds of the psyche unconsciously ripe.

III

I wake in reinvention.  Unstitched.  Seamless as porcelain.  Rejected from death with no markers of reanimation.  Coated in hot mud.  Young fungus still maturing on every surface of the mouth.

I glow celestial.  Recall the moments of being without body and the warm-blooded heat of a mammal.  No threat of injury.  No consuming paranoia boarding up the masses behind walls of refuge and sanctuary.  The anxious lose the appendage of worry.  The disheartened peel from the husk of melancholy.

IV

and Earth parts as incision, breaks, bleeds for expulsion, and a kidney is rejected, sagging parasitic, folding up inside a lunar crater to die, and the humans lie dormant below the moon shedding its dead weight, hibernating in their wet nests, knees pressed to chests in the fetal position, comatose for the next millennium.

V

Origin: thinnest layer of the unfamiliar, stretched vellum wrapped around the universe.  The place of my restoration when seeped seed-like back underground.  Like a whale, born into a bucket of dust, swallowed up whole by the ocean.

mammalian theater

Tonight we add grammar to our postures:
A comma-curved spine, exclamation splint anchored at the neck.
We do it for the politeness of being, I do it for the applause and the feeding.
All dressed up in clown, curl, unfurl, perform.

The mothers come from the pit of the earth, the infantile hide and cocoon,
the moon exhales a laborious musk, all did and undone in this theater
corrupts, adds calluses to soft meat, collapses the wealth of mediocrity.
We do it for the wisdom, I do it for the exhibition.

The fathers elongate to protect their sacs of incubating children.
Their small breaths slow and reverse for the comfort of throat.
We do it for the bodies, we do it for the swelling,
the lip folds, the mouth-hinge breaks, I do it to be appalling.

Tonight we are so intentional, tonight we are predatory and hostile.
The crowd waiting stale, circulating their drool out the side of the mouth,
licked up back inside by the tongue, in unison, poorly executed as they mock us.

We respond with our anatomy, we stretch the colon long, I burst the bladder.
We pull the vessels with precision, open from the front, bite down, swim in laudanum,
mute the cry, let it resonate as the sound of evolution, branch by branch expansion.
Do it for surgery, do it for knowledge, do it for diagrams and medicine.

We are indigestible, we are perverse while smiling.
We are the torment of homicide in vocal boxes full of lullabies.
Our museum, heavy in histories from bombs to botany, is printed onto folded paper.
We tell stories of hunger and abandonment, how we lifted from the circus
and settled again as vagrants.

Tonight we are so terrestrial, tonight we are land and limb, experimental.
Obscurity flows through us in the torso, at home at the navel, strings us unevenly.
Bent, bruised bodies, contorting for the hope of praise.
Begging for the monetary artifact, the malice cent of necessity.
We do it for the progression, I do it to indulge the compulsion.

The crowd, bored from the lungs up, rips from the soil armed with their own teeth.
Bite off an ear, sink into the fat, gnaw at the loose muscle.
They do it for war, they do it for the consumption.

Tonight we are so parted, tonight we are so pieced.
We come complete, come undone, we come egged, and sovereign,
in the weapon of the human temperament, on the primitive stage of the theater.