Natural History Lessons

  You used to be all green segments  neatly arranged  in a perfect little row. Nubbins for legs,  little orange Velcro hooks for toes.   With such machinery  and such control, you’d inch along — all day and all night.   Beneath your bronze helmet, serrated mandibles, clacking chitinously, mindlessly macerating all leafy matter in your path. Frass burning out your ass —  a nonstop energy extractor, a tireless wormy expander and contractor. Gross, Orderly, and Acceptable — You stuck to the contract. Kept the pact.   Until, one day you blacked out. Woke up in a bag,  a disorderly warm soup,  a dizzy swirl. You felt viscerally (even without viscera) that to be suddenly  Wormless and Formless was wholly unacceptable.   How does the formless find form?   In your terror, you tried force, you tried will, you tried plans and panic. Alas no, you stayed soupy and droopy.   Then one day, just when you thought  you were ...

Perfectly perch the Occipital on Condyle. Insert Head of Femur into Ilium, plus or minus 0.3 degrees. Mind the Acromial Angle . . . just so . . .   and you yet may sleep. Yet, no matter how hard you tend to the osseous matter, those offal innards are still so soft. And it is awful that those inners are, at some point, to be presented back to you. And while it was forecasted  with 100% probability, plus or minus zero standard deviations, that you would suddenly be gifted with a flayed bit of your own fillet — draped sadly over the tine of a fancy fork or accidentally attached by a dirty old bandaid to a glossy bit of junk mail  (a sudden startled “Ugh” when the pile got turned over for some damn random reason) —  the point is that you are are still surprised.   Because after the 164 th  time, you might expect tedium  in the mustering muttering myocardium. Yet, here you are again, shocked at the awful awe-full offal — that soft tissue that oozes out, no ...

Inkblot shadows  paint the shoreline. It seems I am here  for a Rorschach test. Rusty hues  are belied by winter's kiss in the air as I skim along the surface  of the cold watery  womb of the hills. To be fair,  this lake turns  everyone into a poet. Gun and Death worshipping men  come out here to fish  from their chubby camo kayaks, fall into a trance, and find themselves  using their tactical knives  to inscribe haikus  on the lids  of their tackle boxes. The lake  is a silent tomb today. A curled brown leaf  floats motionless upon its perfect twin. A dead honeybee  lies completely still cradled gently  in a net  of oxygen kissing hydrogen. Sweet seductive  leafrot and deertang  waft off of shore.  Where, stark gray treeforms beckon — Sirens,  with triple twisting legs  and rocks lodged permanently  in their curvaceous crotches, sing. Their rooty toe tips  sip t...