The Scent of Rot

Passionate whispers of escaping gases
break through bubbles from beneath,
popping and relinquishing ropes of yellow green mucus scum everywhere,
as lips parting leave a strip of saliva glistening from its listening ear.

An old, thick snake gets hit in its eye and snaps its head side to side
and flows away angrily in an oxbow path back to another of its dens,
another dim hole in the ground where it won't be bothered when it does what snakes do in their spare time,
in those months between meals that they digest for so long they forget how they caught it,
where they bask in the bliss of contented intestinal contractions,
mending the molecules of frogs and rats into shiny new skins and the powerful constrictions of their muscles which extract the pesky life from tasty meat.

Its wide belly scales caress the ground silently undulating against dirt:
that amalgamated blend of untold infinities of unmarked graves transrupting into each other,
the sepulchers of kings and caterpillars become one mass grave
rotting together into the soft moist black mush within which roots and worms sow their circuitous paths that trace the calligraphy of decay into the fermenting micturation of the once been,
which, through these channels, slowly seep back into feeling,
atom by precious atom,
to again experience the luscious grasp of nerves and senses,
and the nonnegotiable deadlines of hunger, sleep and mortality.