The Old Crab

Long have I languished under the weight
Of many-garlanded, barnicled time.
Every joint creaks like the wooden planks of a frigate
While the silence of the deep makes of me a sad mime.

My friends (there are only two) who have thus far won the war;
Who have run the natural gauntlet of predator and prey.
They too are slow and their shells can molt no more,
So they grow haggard with the stalagmite strain.

But one in particular, Coriander, his name,
Sported fronds of seaweed from his barnicled abode,
And after a time it seemed as if he wore a sargasso mane
Or tail of an exotic fish, to see how it flowed.

Coriander did not complain.
No creak or squeak did we hear.
Coriander did not feel pain.
The answer was ocean clear.

While we plodded dismally with an arthritic speed,
Coriander's sargassum plumage eased his burden,
And then we saw him float away by his weed
Like a bubble of air into the light above.

I then wept (for crustaceans can cry) to see him go;
Then painfully crept through the rocks to wonder how I will go.

Friedrich's Unwanted Legacy

The lion, once camel, became a child thus:
The coachman's whip descended
upon the wearied horse
like a brownshirt's truncheon.
Friedrich vaulted upon the fallen beast.
A blanket he became to the tormented,
crying, "Basta! Basta!"
as his friends removed him
from a carcass he could not save.

Silent, staring, dressed in white,
a color common of converts,
he watched aloof his sister's spell
as she weaved a caveat into a cult;
an iconoclast, an icon.

And now a history awake
still pines to shake
the lingering nightmare
of a still echoing Kristallnacht.

Jellyfish

Realizing his life was accomplishing nothing
he found a simple secret.
He promptly signed up for Iraq
and, like Byron before him, looked for a fitting place to die.
He took his chapbooks with him
and often strapped them inside his vest
like a suicide bomber.
His sweat and fear soaked into the pages.
A testament to his testosterone.
They called him 'Jellyfish' though no one knew why.

One day near Fallujah they were attacked.
He fired above their heads and died smiling,
for he knew the secret.
He died seeing pages flying from his corpse,
but they couldn't read English.
One Iraqi had a weakness for literature
and kept two of the maroon-stained books.
He translated it years later.
Its words spread like a virus into the minds and mouths of many.
A poet-soldier's ideas survived his form - no afterlife necessary.

A biologist outside an island south of Tokyo
tries to understand the riddle of the giant jellies
that swarm and clog the straits of Nippon.
In time he learns the secret:
Death is Dissemination.