American Kaiju Blues by Greg Lehman

American Kaiju Blues

To look

at me

is to know I shouldn’t

and don’t want

to be here,

call it

separation anxiety,

or your only

self-expressive

natural disaster,

forlorn

and immensely,

terribly,

alone,

your skyline strangling,

world-famous,

cinching

in,

nothing

fitting worse

than your megalopolis

as monk’s cell,

choked with freeways

I find flimsy,

asphalt

like gossamer,

so much thread

I fall through,

cracking girders,

and halving arches

as I

try to leave

with a stride

that can’t help

but devastate,

sending sewage

spewing up

under one

block-smashing-step

and the next,

incapable of avoiding

the cataclysmic

in a maze that supports

little, from what

I can tell,

your architecture

as commerce

run amuck,

piles

suffocation

on solitude, winding

and colossal, hallowed labyrinth

of borrowed funds for a forest of sealant,

steel, concrete, and rebar on borrowed budgets

that keep building constriction in sharpened spires

like ammunition coated in branding florescent

and bright on long hollows

I howl across in this,

the raw havoc

I have

no choice

in reaping,

I’m scared,

and I hate how,

crammed in

as we are,

you

have to be

scared, too,

millions

of you

and the sole proxy

of my type

stuck,

both of us

crushed,

at least

you have

each other,

sprinting

and screaming

out from under

my warpath

together,

pulverizing drainage

to dust,

sure,

I’m a terror that has to,

has to

keep moving,

so, I understand

why violence is selected,

appreciate the way

I’m drawing live fire, you can’t have me, won’t have this and still function,

so I don’t

interpret the onslaught

as personal,

take

the tracer bullets

in stride,

wear their chatter

and the landing of rockets

in brilliant blast

radii as

recognition, I’m here,

our engagement

caught, the warmth

absorbed  

and aglow

in my

carapace,

lost

in the miasma

that is me,

is

ordnance of a kind, too,

rife with ruin and needs

replete, to be clear, I’m sorry, I’d leave if I could, in the meantime,

take the fire escapes at top speed, I’m howling

for whoever might answer, the notes

all ire and longing, laments for

if I, did I, being me, drive

my own people

away?

Was I cast here? I have to wonder as I trudge forward is this hell I’m in earned? Is this made worse by design in the hell I inflict?

The speed with which my parasites sprint away is not lost on me, they can’t flee me fast enough, voracious, brimming over

with wrath and bared fangs

like mine, vaulting into intersections left vacant, apartments standing empty and quiet, lightless tunnels closing in.