There’s a stretch of overpass somewhere after 40th on the Westside Highway, from within a cab, at night, the wind in your face, the cool wind in your face bathing your eyes, where on your right launch these sudden things, planet things, high-rises and apartment-towers lit up and mysterious like glowing-algaed underwater obelisks –

& maybe you’re a little drunk, maybe you’re relaxed and dissolving into the seat a little during this stretch of overpass after 40th, at night, when you’re in the back of this cab and everything’s okay, the night finally over, everything settling in your brain like cool milk, like a soft cool hand on your hot forehead –

– five minutes, five little minutes where everything’s absolutely okay, nothing has yet happened and nothing yet will, a glad stasis, a waiting-and-not-waiting, a being, breathing in through your nose so hard your throat feels ice-watered, the wind in your face, on your skin, in your brain –

when come the sudden things,
the giant underwater glowing things,
the high-rises noble, dispassionate,
a little cruel,
like ancient statues,
bearing witness like olmec heads, like maori,

and you’re a boy again,
on a daytrip to the beach,
praying the car won’t stop,

the salt-sea smell in your nose,
hearing the shore grow closer, distant gulls,
tasting sandgrit in your molars,
watching power lines dip and rise, dip and rise,
wanting nothing to ever choke this perfect sleeping breath
of pure motion.

I remember the juice’s vivid stains all over the cutting board, finding dried droplets days later around my white stove. It was a messy first eating, I didn’t know what I was doing. I gave myself up to clawing and gouging out the little seeds like jewels or eyes.

It’s become a kind of careful surgery for me. The prodding, coaxing a seed-cluster from the snug membrane, itself like a birth sac. But sometimes I get impatient and take bites, membrane and all, and just use my tongue to push out seeds and spit out the rest. It feels cannibalistic to eat one sometimes, like I’m violating something. Other times I feel like I’m privy to secrets just by looking inside one, groping for the right spot to nudge out a seedbundle. Then it’ll hit me, this mild awe that I’m privileged enough to be let into it, the spilling red, the little white partitions, the sweet roe, the delicate seed-sanctums.

The toad trembled on the highest branch of the tallest tree in the forest, nibbling the moss that grew there.

He’d eaten all the moss except for a few last patches, and only now realized where he was, as the last mouthful sat half-chewed in his jaws.

“How did I get here, just feet from clouds? All my brothers and sisters are far below and I can’t even see them. I don’t even remember climbing this high. How am I going to get down?”

Just then he noticed an ant on a leaf nearby.

“Ant,” said the toad, “Can you help me?”

“If I can,” said the ant, “But I don’t know why I’m here myself. All I know is I was hungry and followed the tree’s tasty leaves to the top. I’m too scared to crawl back. Maybe we can work together to get down.”

The toad flicked his tongue and ate the ant.

“I think I will live here from now on,” said the Toad.

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2007

A maggot was feasting on the decaying flesh of a dead king.

Nearby, a tick, who was busy feasting on a living king, called out to the maggot: “Maggot: you’re crazy. Why are you eating from a filthy corpse when you can taste the sweet blood of the living?”

At that moment the king, oppressed by the tick for years, in a fit of despair lit his body on fire.

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2007