Lungless tetrapod (a poem)

Gas exchange, they call it―
but you can’t breathe.
God gave you skin penetrated by capillaries
instead of pulmonary arteries,
and it’s affecting your brain.
“Novel cranial architecture,”
some dude wrote. But,
it’s affecting your numbers, too.

No really.

No lungs meant no ribs, and
no ribs meant never
were you gonna walk erect.
Even with a hundred vertebrae.
Which is why you think about dolphins so much,
with those good brains, which is
why you smile at your dorsal “fin” so much.
In quotes because no one really thinks it’s a fin.

This time, really.

You look like a worm. A worm
with nostrils and rings and
eyes that are dorsal instead of dorsolateral…
You know Darwin was only on The Beagle
cuz he was an aristocrat, right?
Vice. Admiral. Robert. FitzRoy.
Didn’t wanna dine in the company o’
sailors for four years.

And so what if…

You’d pick the overprivileged
22 year old into beetles, too
(beetles as evidence of excess).
If anybody ever asked you. Thing is,
you’re a skin breather. All
backbone and no class. All
teeth and no filter. Perfect
in god’s eyes, sure, but

shit in everybody else’s.