The Lizard Poem by PRATHAP KAMATH

The Lizard

You bear my roof on your belly.
You think I'll blow up with gratitude?
I am man and I eat only my dreams.

You were an ominous chirp
from the dark and the unseen
guiding the steps of my forefathers.

But your rendezvous on my wall
over my wakeful gaze of wants -
the moment of a lotus explosion
in the sleeping alleys of my brain.

You met your creeping mate
in a reptile waltz of sleazy grip
after eons of mutual gazing that ran
roots into time before we ever were,
a time before we cut time to our size,
a time filled with cries of love and death.

You met her in a reptile waltz
of sticky grip that tucked her then
under your love that lasted the time
a poem took to fertilize a poet.

I could never contain the truth
that you could rival us
in this crumbling act of decimation -
that you could do it with the exactness
of a radium needle, and then move apart
to mouth a willing fly in the next second
to teach me the lesson that
spending and filling is the only survival.