Jellyfish

Jellyfish! Who could have named you other than a creature structured by a cage of bone? Opaque but transparent your arrested evolution lives in an alien perfection. You abide inside the sea, yet billowing that sea through your bald, bladder body. Propelled by the encompassing and likewise, encompassed and captured by that which fills and surrounds you. Jellyfish, not a fish nor jellied but muscular and powerful yet in a strange, smooth-sided way the way the deep is. Slick and slippery as oleo. At once both a slack rippling and a tenacious tough whiplash of power. Your form a confliction, a mass of otherworldly contradiction. Under the knife your body defies reason, until we see the aerodynamics, the subcutaneous aquatic precision of your parts. That glistening hood, the bell shaped corpus of you, but no brain just a stomach pouch in place of any mentality, perhaps your thoughts float free inside that gaseous umbrella of your mind? Multiple eyes dotted around the hood like inky portholes. A sallow mandible mouth tucked like a fist under your hood from which those ‘oral arms’ fan away from to reach and gather morsels of meat. These your only speech as you consume a thrashing utterance. Loosely arrayed about those mouth appendages, are long trailing tentacles, each sensitive feeler equipped with venomous cells encrusted with barbs that bite with a poisonous ferocity. Jelly fish, your anatomy is upside down and inside out, and yet we cannot doubt the impeccable necessity of you, the point of you, and perhaps even the point of us as we search for that germinal sea within.