...Slither...

That which does not kill you, 

   makes you. 

Makes you  what? 

Makes you  how?

Makes you      who?

Within this slapdash existence 

of potential mortality, and 

against all feasible odds, 

I have somehow managed 

   to persevere. 

I, fully aware of this and that 

and those and them proposed 

to mar and mangle 

this life I hold so dear. 

That which does not kill you. 

Does not maim you. 

Soon  mal-

   deforms you. 

Listen:

It is herewith simply assumed 

that I in body 

come complete.

That I’ve toes upon my feet. 

That my sense of sight is sound. 

That I can tell what’s up from down. 

That I can see what’s there on the ground. 

That my body veers to vacant 

from the horror I’ve there found. 

That that which renders fear adheres 

to sear my sheltered psyche. 

This is a state of mind 

and my mind is in a state. 

It slithers, and 

it slithers, and 

it slithers, slithers, slithers, 

for it’s said that I’ve 

a ball of snakes 

coiled ‘bout my 

basal ganglia. 

They say dead-center 

my primordial head 

you will therein find 

a reptilian brain. 

And they would have me 

here look inward, 

yet that which there 

returns my gaze, 

remains a viperine vision of which 

I dare not care to know. 

And though my higher mammalian mind 

would have me limbic limbo ‘neath 

a septic serpent’s stomach, 

it remains a synaptic swamp of which 

I do not care to visit. 

This feeding, 

this fighting, 

this fleeing, 

this fucking. 

‘F’ ALL that shit, for I will 

not consume the snake, no, 

will not combat that 

thing with tail and scale, 

and it and I most certainly won’t… 

   …come to copulate. 

Condom or no, I condemn it. 

That a snake wear a condom seems foolish. 

Indeed that anyone’s rancid reptile mind 

finds fetish in a snake found phallic 

be they damned. 

   Be they damned. 

      Be they cast from Eden damned. 

‘F’ and ‘F’ and ‘F’ and ‘F’. 

Unfettered of the letter, 

I would flee. I would fly. 

Would most surely have fled.

I now with tail here unfurled. 

I now with split-tongue set a sputter. 

And yet… 

And yet here I stand 

so lithe and lathed utter legless. 

Disarm alarmed and 

tube torso traumatic. 

Limbic sans limb and 

limb loss akimbo, 

I collapse upon ground, 

foot foiled and coiled catatonic. 

Now serpentine in body, 

sinuous bone next sinuous bone. 

Denied limb to amble yonder, 

I am lashed within this hither, 

for my reptile mind 

has thus decreed, 

its only option:   

slither.

Ó2019 Jack David Hubbell