Poetry

Crocodiles

on the television the man said that there are many crocodiles
in the sewers beneath New York
City after saying that he brought the crocodiles out crocodiles
or at least the ghosts of them I could trace
the green and brown of crocodiles
in the long orange current I had to wonder
where it was that the crocodiles were going to at least
where they thought it was they were going
to or otherwise if they had made their home there
among the dirt and had resolved to have their
city there once I wrote a story about two people they
lived in a sewer underneath a city
there had been a kind of nuclear disaster
that I never really thought through they had no
food or water but still somehow they
survived I think what I was thinking about were
crocodiles and the reason I am so
interested in them today is because of what they
show namely that we can live in a lot of
places even the most unbearable of them I also
think I have thought too critically about
many things I cannot think through
the world the way a mole or a worm breaks
their way through the ground or a crocodile swims
through a jetsam of death when I think
my thinking does not leave the world a world intact
it leaves the world a hand with only the skin of its
fingers a boneless hand or a stanza
with no people in it and what good is a stanza
that no one lives in especially when there are
crocodiles living in the swamp beneath New
York City of course the flow of the poem is the flow
of the current and the rocks made of dirt
that are in it and together we have
swam through the current and now here we are covered
in the world we have swam through the most
magical type of bike ride is when a bike
ride happens without a bike ever
being ridden

Joe Vaughan