The night sky
is streaked with corpses,
and in the daylight,
grass is beginning to grow.
The caribou said,
you can’t rub two sticks together
this far north of the tundra,
unless they grow out of your head.
When you don’t eat for a month,
your teeth get loose in your mouth,
your gums soften and ache.
Soon you forget to be hungry.
Have you ever felt your own entrails shrivel
and go slack? The dried sack of your useless
gall bladder banging against your fatless liver
like a tiny tom on a toy drum?
God’s joke.
Black skin under a white cloak.
God’s Joke.
I can’t drown.
I don’t freeze.
I can only fail to eat.
God’s joke.
I got nine inch nails
and I can’t even cut my own throat.
God’s joke.
If the ice don’t melt they say I’ll
be a sea creature someday.
The fat fucking douchebear who
crawled out of the brine a million
years ago and now wants only
to slide back in.
My hands and feet are nearly flippers.
Hips narrowing with every cub.
Some day they say my hind legs will fuse together
and I’ll only swim.
God’s joke.
I’m turning into my own meat.
The seals,
they laugh at this feat.
God’s joke.
If I don’t evolve a million times faster,
I’ll croak.
I’d bite the head off a man,
if I wouldn’t lose a tooth. I’d hold his shoulders with two paws and clamp his skull
in my jaws,
and pull the smirk clean off his spine.
But I’m not a shark,
and my teeth don’t grow back,
if I lose one to a stubborn skull,
thorax or thighbone.
They taste like shit anyway.
Men.
And I’m tired of being shot.
I’ll wait for this one to finish dumping the bag
And then I’ll see in the green metal bin
what might be least nauseating
if not enough to fill me.
I tear at the tape with my teeth so I can
open the contents of a diaper and eat.
Hardly any food in this bin, but many diapers,
half of them stinking and full.
I have never tasted the little human shit machines. But I have bitten in half
a milk-filled monkseal’s pup
and felt it’s swollen stomach burst
warm against the hollow fur of my chest.
God’s joke.
A great white stealing scraps.
God’s joke.
Sucking marrow from spent chicken bones.
God’s joke.
Tonguing spilled Coke.
God’s joke.
There’s my face again on that fucking soda can.
The white fox says its a sign of love.
The humans they only paint what they want to keep. “What was that you said, I am old and can’t hear you..” I say to my friend the fox before pulling with my teeth the tendons
from the backs of his dainty haunches,
the fox as always unable to resist
stepping closer to repeat his mocking.
I have yet to eat a narwhal, and given my state, it’s seems likely to remain unlikely.
I found a whale once, pinched between
a shifting ice shelf, and I dined on it live.
Our little neighborhood sushi bar.
Everyone had a bite.
Even my friend the limping fox.
Oh the good times!
I don’t think they are coming again.
Something in the bin catches my paw and cuts. I don’t know if I have enough blood
to manage all the bleeding.
It’s opened a vein. I want to feel grateful, I’m ready for sleep. But quickly the trickle slows.
I pad out from behind the dumpster and begin my sad march back towards the sea.
I leave bloody prints for a thousand yards.
Some local hero tracks me back to the cutbank burrow I’m laying in now,
The little metal pipe he aligns between my eyes.
He thinks he has one shot, but I’m so depressed, he’s got at least three. The fucker’s worse off than me.
His gun so old it jams, his skin so saturated,
he sweats out the liquor. And stinks. Too putrid even for me. Not worth eating even when starving.
With a single swipe I sweep his puddly legs, but he dies from fright.Now they’ll come.
His putrid friends.
Now they’ll all come.
On their snow machines
With their oiled guns,
and leaky guts.
Let them.
I lay there.
I’ve no where else to go.
It’s February,
and according to the birds,
the snow has already begun to melt,
or never fell to begin with.
And never will again.
The birds are liars.
But some of what they say is true.
I open the dead man’s gut with three pulls
from my paw. What spills out is still warm,
and melts the snow. I pull the loose thread lazily. Stretch the man’s yarn. Arrange it in a pattern. Careful to keep it from snapping.
It pulls a long way, but I am clumsy,
and eventually break it.
If I live I will tell the fox,
(if he is not dead, I think he is dead)
that I am not art,
but artist!
God joked!
That tiny asshole,
the fox, I miss him now.
We would have laughed at that one
together.
Emaciated Polar Bear Hunts for Food Outside an Industrial Russian City
