All you people, walking along all your streetsides,
listening to the air rustle the leaves,
misinformed dogs stand their delusional ground,
cars purr zip and whirr,
children shout high and scamper everywhere,
water-like seeping into all nooks and crannies
of the organized world.

All you people who hear the clank and smell the stench
of stopping, situating, pistoning garbage trunks,
on a new, worn, and/or gum-blackened cement sidewalk,
next to a street fresh paved and punging tar
or old and regular, silently bearing all while sinking low.
All you good people in the cityscapes, bayous, forest hills
who listen to civilized beeps, clanks, cackles, rattles
through the rock the rap the jazz the symphony
pumped ‘cross plastic knobs into your ears.

All you people waving candles and holding hope
for a different tomorrow.

I am here!
You heard that right:
I am here!

You didn’t know I had it in me
to roll up out of that tiny ball, shattering the egg
that sat still since the time of the monsters.
Look at my laughing yellow stalagging teeth.
Understand my smooth dagger claws
and the impenetrable scales shingling my bulk.

For to be, I tell you, a sport,
I gave a sixty thousand year head start.
You built your weapons, powerful enough to destroy the earth–
as if I needed the earth!
You put your systems in place, organized your thoughts,
studied and optimized strategies psychological and physical.
Pardon me, forgive me, excuse me,
I just have to laugh!

A rich, righteous, eloquently strong, booming laugh,
flattening whatever city I’m nearby.
Oh, gosh, my breath’s so inferno, isn’t it?
I quite evaporated your puny fleshy form, didn’t I?
Sorry, sorry–I really need to watch myself!
Don’t know my own strength!
Except I do.
And I’m very ready to show it to you.

That’s right–
good night,
cause you’re going down,
down to the ground
like bugs underfoot.

You have no chance.
You imagine you do,
and that gives you
a certain luster,
a definite cuteness,
a real, if pathetic,
charm.

Oh, oh, OK, sure!
Try that angle,
huddle up in your churchy dens,
cuddling together beneath
fraying, decaying,yellowed, brittle pages
that’ve coddled you on down the ages.
“The demon thing with the dragon wings
and the howling, mean-eyed sing-song-sing
can destroy our bodies but never our souls,
never our heart and the light who keeps us whole!”
So cute,
so lovable,
so very wrong.

Friends, people, don’t you get it?
tearing your puny bodies into jag-edged
bloody rags strewn across telephone wires
and on pavements so sturdy and rough
is not my main game.
I just do that so you get to watch
with your gooshy eyballs
as I sink your heavens,
dungeon your souls,
laugh away your pride,
hiccup off your virtues,
shit upon your wisdoms,
expose as sordid fraud
all your heroics,
your hard-fought insights,
your courageous self-overcomings.

I’m here to tell you that jupiter
must swallow the universes,
and jupiter is cold as spiritual death.
Jupiter is the final answer.
All your wise ones, your fools,
your sturdy practical folks
were all always wrong.
All your human ideas
just so many pebbles
tossed feebly into the gurgle-quick creek.

The joke is on you,
because I’m not even evil.
I’m just the brute facts,
the natural meanness,
the cruel happenstance
of the real.

Sorry!
‘Cept ’cause I’m not.
I don’t care
if I hurt you
now and forever.

Signed,

Your Dragon

AMW/BW