Lobsters and philosophers

Lobsters and philosophers

They feel changes in water chemistry
with their attuned antennae and body hairs
these gangsters from the deep—
tough guys who take nothing on their carapace,
deep thought thugs
who mow down sea urchins, red rock crabs,
mussels herring, and sea cucumbers.
These garrulous creatures
will not hesitate to cannibalize.

This society lives in shadowy worlds,
uses gangland-style execution:
pulverizing shells and grinding fish bones
with big-toothed crusher claws,
atomizing weaker thoughts
ersatz systems, and ill-formed concepts
sticking it to ya like a steak knife
with their finer-edged ripper-pincher claw,
tearing soft flesh like good hit men
tearing soft schools like good think men
wearing their skeleton on the outside.

Then there’s the fateful “claw lock.”
Through Nietzschean will power
they are able to release a claw right out of its socket,
leaving behind a miniscule pink bud.
Their discarded body part drops with a thud like a meat offering.
The opponent, not even feigning remorse
over a one-clawed colleague,
simply eats his opponent’s arm,
becoming boss of the think-tank.

They are cold-blooded, territorial, aggressive, irascible.
They molt, shed, and eat their own old shells,
making themselves ever tougher and more callused.
In their lifetime, most lobsters don’t move far
from where they were spawned.
Most philosophers don’t either.

Their black-dot eyes are propped on movable stalks—
eyes with 10,000 facets.
All those tiny eyes within eyes
detect motion in dim light,
perceiving philosophical nuances,
reading the text behind the text inside the ocean floor.

Their whole body becomes a sense organ
detecting with its chemo-receptors
the moods of the waters, the Zeitgeist,
Weltanschauung, Weltschmerz.
They burrow by day
prowl by night
head out head first,
and live alone, except to mate.
and except to fight.

Ah but the fate of a lobster is to be boiled
just like Nietzsche was fated
to have a mother and sister
who boiled him in derision
and charged admission tickets
to ridiculing audiences who watched Frederich
claw and spar in his syphilitic madness.

An original thought like a live red lobster
occurs only once in every 10 million.
The rest are ensconced
in darkened crenellated calcified shells
of speckled black and green,
tossed without hesitation
into the common pot.


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--Aaron's mom wrote this a long time ago. Says Arlene, "It's quite strange reading this poem after so many years...it's kind of an 'out of body' sensatio, as if a levitating Mahatma took over and wrote the piece on the orders of the quack theosophist Madame Blavatsky.

When Bob Dylan was interviewed not too long ago, he said something similar about his old stuff. 'Darkness at the break of noon,' he began to intone. Then he stopped, asking where this all came from. In short, Dylan admitted that he couldn't write that now.

Yeah. Good question. Where does poetry come from afterall? Maybe most poets are just channels for the muse, until the channels become structurally unsound and simply collapse into disuse. How's that for a morose outlook? Ha ha. Well. I am serious about the mystery of poetry. And the mystery of human consciousness. Keep musing/amusing/bemusing/confusing!"