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Sunday 8 September 2013

Mantis Shrimp Pray for Blindness

Mantis Shrimp are delicacies
Undelicate delights; devouring killers
Cursed with mystic sight,

Someone told me they see light
Percolated through curtains of dense shadowy hues
Of endless blues, and such light, such beauty...

Armoured and avid, moving through
The dim they see and sea shimmering crystal cones
Unfolding into rainbows of unimagined light.

Can you not understand, then, their devouring?
How each sight enflames their lust?
That endless hunger always - for how can it not be unsatisfied?

The Mantis raises it’s claws stained with slow blood in prayer
To the wavering world above - ripe with proffered flesh
And langorous-finned appetite - and bliss descends

It fills it’s mouth again and again and distills in its own flesh
Passionate emerald blues, the icy fire of reds, joyful expansions
Of yellow and such other things as have no name.

The Mantis, in its endless ravening,
Fills and fills and empties itself again
And still nothing can satisfy.

So it scatters prisms of summoning-
Curves itself in an endless spiraling invitation of desire,
Proffers its beauty in whorish abandonment:

Come, come closer…
Be flesh, be meat, be soul to me
Fill my eyes, my mouth, fill me; be me

It seeks and seeks, and then
In one thunderous flash of ecstasy,
It is blinded, it is seen.

Manuela Cardiga

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