Creature Feature

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I’ve soldiered nature
through a thousand drive-ins
in this fakey fish-man’s suit,
patrolling the mind’s lagoon
of greeny silt-warm water
for every threat of man
though spawn of him I am,
the awful frog prince with
claws longer than licorice.

I thicken my gumbo
with the occasional
airtube-fed mermaid,
her scream a torrid spume
of escaping bubbles;
yet their eyes are
always contrary,
sultry and demure
in wide surrender,
Death delving everything
a gal never could quite find
inside the airlock of
a real man’s kiss.

For years I’ve picked
my teeth afterwards
with splinters of balsa fin-joints ,
wondering just what part
of the grander drama
I’ll eventually capture
and strangle with these mitts:

After ten thousand matinees
I wish I had better answers.

The routine itself has
gotten old as instinct
with the same old arrogant
and blind invasion
of my dark soul’s moat
by a boat whose keel
I can’t quite bite through,

the same nightly crawl up
from of moonless black water
to lurch on wet feet
to portholes where I stick
a webbed hand in
waving Howdy! from
the abyssal plain

only to be welcomed by
a lantern’s thrown fire,
skedaddling back—again,
again—into the drink
in fear and pain and rage.

Ten thousand times I’ve
nursed my wounds
waiting for the director’s cue
to wreak my wet revenges,
carving Kilroys and
mermaid boobies on
the fake foam rocks,

buzzing old sea-chanteys
through gills that sound
like busted speakers,
trying out new moves –-
slash this way? move my
mouth like a fish out of water
while my eyes bug like boils?—

No matter.

They always get the worst of me,
leaving me floating down and down
as still as a just-fucked drowsing lover,
fading to black as “The End” glows
with ragged letters on the screen
just before the movie itself blacks out.

I shouldn’t complain.
A gigs go, my three days’
harrow of drive-in terror
gives the solace of a career;

a beast could retire on residuals
after fifty years of spinning reels
and draw a happy pension,
appearing at monster-mash conventions
posing fierce and signing 8x10s,
taking bobby-soxers out
back for a swipe
in Fear’s backseat
before their dweeb boyfriends
give me chase & claims
his right to a saltier embrace,
become the Hero of her womb.

Fact is, I now account this lagoon
my Airstream mansion by the sea:
the mortgage is cheap –-
three good moves a day
followed by the always fatal one—

And the vantage so swoony-green
five leagues down where
violins swim the silt serene
of the next crumbling theater,
the smoothest glass
to crash and shatter the mind
into a dancing shrieking thing–:

It’s enough to make a monster
happy, perchance even to sing,
reaching for another throat like
the Elvis of fright’s redsilver screen,
delivering for a mad Director
another perfect shredding scream.

February 2012

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Submitted to d’Verse Poets’ Open Link Night #32.