Crocodylia

poem by Jason Fernando

He sat heavily on the cushioned surface, eyes jittering out the window. Inside, a warm room, its low-lit scenery accented by the blue-cold glare emanating from beyond café windows, those moderating view-panes and embassies to the external. Outside, cool air shifted imperceptibly in convective motions, as visibly all was still and unmoving as morning air. Coffee cups lay on the tables. The mugs and juice bottles—empty, half-empty—containing worlds. His mind was a labyrinth. His eyes, spinning and scanning over printed words—pages, flickering—were hailed by a singular image emerging from the mist.

Alligator.

Alligator became the focal point of his sensory universe. The mind is its own place, and in itself can make of a man a fish, a star, an alligator. And so it was. Reptilemind. Crocodylidade sapien sapien, crawling on four ambidextrous limbs over the porous waves and sub-waves of biological perception.

Who’s to say what a reptile feels?
The stark immediacy of physical form?
The weightlessness of freeform imagination?
The omnipotent macro-actualization of non-doing?
The infinite polyverse of the mind?

Or is it rapt only in that unspoken, underlying imperative that drives the evolutionary process? That singular verb that underpins the biological?

Exist.