A slug, after having taken a very long drag on a cigarette by Layla Ormbrek
I could say “eat my dust,”
but we both know that will never happen,
how hollow that old chestnut sounds,
coming from me, as
as hollow as the
rotten, caved-in nurse log where I was
curled, in pulsing, hermaphroditic bliss with my
mate just this morning. Jealous?
You see, my plight is no
Hero’s Journey. Joseph Campbell could never.
There is no prize, no diamond, no conclusion,
save for the salt shaker, wielded by a zealous
gardener, or the moment I find myself
caught in the beak of a satisfied crow,
my limbless body waving like an earth-toned
surrender flag, my feelers retracting a
final time.
Down here in the understory,
we don’t die of old age,
let’s just say that.
And what of my family left behind?
Sensing gradations of light and dark,
muscling their way through the mulch,
testing the air, seeking nutrition with
a sort of dumb optimism that’s almost
embarrassing. Each sliding along on a foot
that is also a stomach, intimately
acquainted with each nettle,
each sword fern, slicked bodies
tentative, shrinking from the razor
eyes of the rest of the food chain.
Vertebrates, those goddamn bullies,
With their legs and articulating spines
and complex musculature. And us?
We’re just trying to get by, ever so
slowly, the schoolyard geeks of the
ecosystem, Nature’s mucous-coated
Poindexters, always shaken down
for a few sorry grams of protein.
Our existence, our Great Work, converted
into an afternoon snack for some middling,
trifling ass duck or raccoon.
While they knock us back, cramming me
and mine down their dopey gullets, they’ll never know how
we reshape their very world,
never marvel at the decomposing,
the steady chewing, the processing that we do
to form this forest floor, to churn this biosphere, to keep it
humming, to make it sing.
No, they’re content to hop or dart or trot, to flit from
branch to branch, to snap us up in their jaws, never caring
as we give up our lives to power their pumping legs or wings,
to grease their stealthy slithering,
to gloss their feathers,
to speed the carefree flights
that we will never fathom.
I know where we fall in the scheme. I should play humble,
meek, glad to be here. But see, that tastes like parched leaves
on a scorching August day. I don’t want it.
And, no, you’ll never eat my dust, that much is true.
So how about you choke on the bitter slime that
I leave in my wake?