"Momia's Metamorphoses" and "Momia's Mauled Metamorphoses"

Momia's Metamorphoses 

Your body like warped coffee candy
Mouth yawning to swallow me whole
Fleshclay molded by time's fingers
Eyes sunken to dark stars
Where lingers the terrible desire
To lock with you forever in a thousand yard stare
Withered limbs to seize and hold
 
And here I am again inside myself
The hungry void of ages
The moneysuck of gawping tourists
Staring out at me once more
From a shiny tourist brochure
 
I don't fit inside a doll house
I am not a vampire, but I endlessly sleep in a coffin
Bloodless. I scare little girls
without even speaking. Stale swaths
of dirty hair are stuck inside my mouth
Cover my dead eyes. I want to turn my hair
into flying insects. I want to turn my head
around and around in different directions
 
My carpet of deceased follicular folly
rides itself into a starfield frozen in time
This vampire hair continues to flow from my scalp
tangled and brambled and flowered
Dead flowers flow within me and without my body
 
I am paralyzed by hypnagogic fancies that are not my own
Mary Shelley released an ectoplasmatic fright mask goon
to terrify my slumbering doctored sleep
The bloodless creeps seep out of my honeycombed cells
I am not altogether well. I am backtracking
and strangely growing at the same time

 


 

Momia's Mauled Metamorphoses 

Backtracking vertebrae work their way up
to my broken neck, break through dead skin
turn themselves into even more hair trails
I am becoming the opposite of a celestial body
Implosions morphing into explosions morphing
into internal locomotion, growing giant worms
 
Larval shape shifters clone themselves
expand the coffin into an above ground swimming pool
filled with visitors, bedrooms, theaters, waves
gushing and drooling and writhing worm holes
 
Home alone in a mud pyramid warehouse tended
by a witch, whose violent eyebeams scream contagion at
moviegoers black-massed together, complicit in fleshly fiendish
horrors, snacking on psychedelic blood pudding with a flexible
spoon, as the moon trackers fill my vacant womb
with gene-spliced spiders and talking heads in a jar
 
In these new world museum style morgue machinations
the reinforced parasites grow wider
as they enter my ripped and expanding lobes
Spurting dark confetti embryos
 
I am large, I contain multitudes 
of spectral worms that devour my lunch
wiring themselves into my big brain pain
splashing the Weird Wide World with gory rainbows 
that minor bards of the Allfather flock to gather 
 
The spectator price keeps going up and up and
the visitors do not realize, soon they will all be fused together
to form a hugely irregular enormous Momia
Preserved human organs intertwined with robotic limbs
juxtaposed with a grotesquely interconnected chomping
force field of mercurial incisors and scalped tongues

 

 

Juliet Cook

Juliet Cook's poetry has appeared in a small multitude of print and online publications. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, most recently including red flames burning out (Grey Book Press, 2023), Contorted Doom Conveyor (Gutter Snob Books, 2023), and Your Mouth is Moving Backwards (Ethel Zine & Micro Press, 2023). She has another new poetry chapbook, REVOLTING, forthcoming from Cul-de-sac of Blood in fall 2024. Her most recent full-length poetry book, Malformed Confetti was published by Crisis Chronicles Press in 2018. You can find out more at https://julietcook.weebly.com/. Juliet recommends Planned Parenthood.

Alex S. Johnson

Alex S. Johnson has worn many hats in his 57 years on the planet, including college English instructor, music journalist, editor, publisher, songwriter, human rights activist, artist and poet. His books include The Doom Hippies and The Death Jazz. He lives in Sacramento, California with memories of rock and roll grandeur and excess. Alex recommends donating to the Special Olympics.

 

Edited for Unlikely by Jonathan Penton, Editor-in-Chief
Last revised on Wednesday, July 3, 2024 - 20:57