Rust

I’m wanting a new monster,

A new sort of immortal,

One who will help me withstand

Withering new kinds of news

By naming them, giving them

Their own allegorical

Mythology. There’s no beast,

No named nightmare fantasy,

No dragon, no manticore,

No alien predator

Who can stand in for the way

The world keeps coming back up

In the throat of informing

Itself all about itself,

Gagging the ouroboros.

This is not Leviathan.

This monster is spherical,

A bubble studded with knives,

Its inside empty of life,

A grotesque illustration,

A realistic portrait

Of life, nonetheless, as lies,

Of life that eats through its eyes.

Of course it’s a parasite—

No predator could devour

So many at once, so much—

But it’s not some tiny bug,

Not merely microscopic.

It is a hybrid of us,

Of virus, and of fungus,

So gigantic and robust

That it looks like a forest,

Like a landscape given flight,

Floating and humming, hollow,

A vast angel drawn in spores,

One great circle of god and dust,

A whole globe’s dreadful monster,

Imagination corrupt,

The most transformative lust

Since oxygen made Earth rust.