ELEGY FOR THE LUMBERING MONSTER

Vaya con Cthulhu is what I always say
in moments like these though
it tends towards wasted sentiment
in the best, most literary ways,
and, anyway, I’m struck by your end,
your unremarked end, your ragged
fin de siecle demise, and I wonder
if you have even been informed
that all your shambling power is gone—
that nobody thinks of you anymore,
abject blips of terror pinging
about in the catacombs of the heart.
From your cheaply adorned sarcophagus,
a word which means flesh
eating, you stumbled out
as though you were in no hurry
except to make your listless, plaintive hymn.
And this was supposed to be
an eternal horror, but to us
now you’re plucky more than evil,
determined in a way that
Americans can never get enough of,
zombified in the brine
of our own apocalyptic zeal.
I wonder if you know,
if you understand your fallen place,
now that all our beasts,
our lithe undead, our sprinting succubae,
have broken away, aerobic,
clawing at the sub-compact
in wild reverse, the steering wheel slick
with undetermined blood,
the tires smoking sickly on the black
ribbon of asphalt,
which I cannot help but remind
is made of other dead
beasts: the allosaur, the brachiosaur,
the suddenly wiped-out
for reasons we don’t know
and so are fascinated,
imagining the black horizon’s end.
My own end is what
we don’t speak of,
though in the marbled blindness of your eyes
it’s easy to imagine.
And I do but away from me I run.