Octopus Riddle

Octopus Riddle


Who am I to mock and deconstruct you humans?
I've seen your eyes through the glass, watched you
Floundering, your limbs flailing the water.

I did not come up battling gravity as did all
Those land animals. Breathing air, humans
Trekked out, discovered all continents.

How utterly different from my world. My brood,
Some one hundred species, are found in all seas,
At all depths. Like the humans, we are generalists.

I am a solitary species. My life is a mission to
Engender in flesh solitary cosmic consciousness.
Only at the end of my life do I give birth.

Except for the Argonauts, we all gave up our shells,
Sacrificing them to become shape-shifters,
Contortionists, taking our prey, arms outstretched.

Let us just say we differ in almost all respects.
I have three hearts. You can call me spineless.
I am the authentic blue blood. But what I want

You humans to see, is your centralized heads,
An aristocracy more efferent than afferent.
And so your worlds grow, as entropy expands.

How different from my own way: most of my
Neurons are not in my brain, but in my arms,
Yet I can hatch stratagems, maintain a map,

Shape-shift, re-color my skin, but my arms
Are like eyes, their tips tasting molecules.
Each moves separately, as I wish it to.

You humans stand there, wanting to be seen.
But I disappear: my skin changes color and
Texture, to match my varied environment.

I am prey for the grouper and the moray eel,
But I eat their eggs, when I get back to my lair,
After walling up the door from the inside.


-JPM April 22 2011

Octopus Riddle

Planetary Flight


Born in an eagle's eyrie -
Sing, birds – sing.
Dying in the crush of poetry -
Ring, words – ring.

Looking glass in hand, he peers
Into the beating heart
While the idle brain just leers
At love's deleting art.

For what image of identity
Can survive love embraced,
Or look into infinity
And not be effaced?

Let us cheer with cups of light:
Raise high the crystal goblet
As if we could invite
The master of this planet.

“Lay off the humans” you fates
Astride Time's biological bases.
“What are these substrates
That animate our faces?”

He would not be happy or sad
But like a ship with heavy keel
He splits the waves like an ironclad.
Only then does he think and feel.

From the basis of alert experience,
I see outlines, edges and splotches
Of color, each with its difference.
Then brain makes its own blotches!

If the sun were a crystal ball
Which you scry through a little hole,
Set would seem the fates of all,
So let it roll, let Sun roll, roll.

He'll find his chance therein,
Not Fettered to some remote planet.
He'll whirl with the great welkin
And dizzily scan it.

And he sees all the white dwarfs
As radiant diamonds in the sky.
And he sees all the brown dwarfs
Waiting for a chance to try.

Galactic explosions and colored stars
How I wonder what you are.
Logic dictates a trip to Mars
Should you become a star.



By JPM Aug. 2011