Be Monster
All mouth. Out of orbit due to an insatiable need to be orbited. At some point there are clouds or waves filled with the foul kelp of cornering questions. Like a black hole yeeting a star through space, it was real when monster queried, Why do you think you carry a small stack of books with you? Out of orbit is perhaps a phantasmagoria of blankness. It was real when the foolishness I was meant to feel oozed from the kelp instead. What I carried out of my own need was innocuous enough. It felt how pages smelled as I turned them. Like Don Quixote made a helmet, I wanted to make the books, with their sturdy covers, a shield. I succeeded almost. Almost, except an impulse rose as I walked starrily away from monster. Almost, except it is impossible to protect what I was protecting indefinitely. Naivety that is ready to crumble does. When it crumbles its pieces fall into a womb where the thing most feared gestates. All mouth. All hunger. All claw. All tooth. All stirrer of disorder I now will be. Hidden and large. Large. Large as the thick-haired ocean of space.
Nathan Spoon in Poetry, October 2020
