The Colossus with the Catacombed Coliseum Stomach

author’s note:

Another poem I recently tweaked.  I first posted it last Halloween, because I believed it was the scariest poem I'd ever written.  I also think it's the saddest.


THE COLOSSUS WITH THE CATACOMBED COLISEUM STOMACH

We must watch
and not drink too much
milk--we might drink
all the milk--eat
all the grain--we must
watch out

or else we won’t have
enough--what with all
those extra mouths

begging for milk
begging for bread
begging for love--

what can we do

with all those
born with a hole
in their cup?

Those bellies
just beg and beg.

We’d better eat them
before they eat us--then
we’ll have enough, enough sun,
enough love--then we can drink
the milk from those clouds
without a bunch of little hands
dragging us down.

Thus stuffed, we’ll be the size
of dinosaurs--we’ll be remembered
as the colossus with
the catacombed coliseum
stomach.

Our appetite will be celebrated
in song--how our great hunger
for life possessed us, made us
devour all--large and small--even
our mountains, our deserts,
our oceans, our fields--

until we grew so big we could swallow
the whole world--swallow all
literature music dance, all
philosophy history psychology--all
painting architecture religion--all
science engineering medicine invention--all
the genius all
the beauty--

until finally we became one
magnified magnificent bust

and lacking anything else
to nibble gobble

we began to sample
our own crooked fingers
our own twisted toes
our pointy elbows
our craggy knees–
the knobbly skin--
warts corns boils--

and despite the bitter acidic taste
damn if we didn’t get used to
the sting the pain the searing fire
of ripping the flesh from our own iron bones.

Yes, we ate ourselves
down to the last dust
particle--that’s all that
remained of us: just
one
enormous
particle
of dust--

but big as it was, it was only
a mere mote out there
in the Universe--

unmoored, adrift, spinning through
galaxy after galaxy--searching among
all those billions of suns, billions
more of planets, searching
for a home--

but we still carried the memory
of being devoured, the hurt
of destroying ourselves, inside and out,
the agony that came from
eating all those poor stomachs,
drinking all those hot tears.

We had swallowed all, all we had left
was our desire to survive, and so
we feared every floating rock,
we even feared black open space--
everything
anything
might eat us.

So though our small particle
searched for a home...

our small particle found no home...

because any potential home...

just might serve us up.

© 2007, Michael R. Patton

innocent audio