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.
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