we now know that all pleistocene reconstructions are inadequately unflamboyant,
that somewhere along the line morphology changed from scaled chest to feather boa;

it feels a waste, that godzilla ought to be blooming with the winter cherries
but instead spends his time beefing with a skyline full of shiny things.

on the street below, a vendor sells plush toys in his likeness,
worshipping another destructive god, the rubble of a deserving city confettied
and falling like rain. we will tell our children about the disaster, how at once
the world birthed a vast excuse and then ended in an explosion of feathers.

i wonder if we too will dull our memories with stone. years from now,
a stranger will pull our gilded bones from the bosom of some rediscovered landfill,
backlit and strung up as exhibits in the long hall of someone else’s retirement gala.
this is to say: shared space, commemorative; on rental from the estate of a now dead face
immortalized in brass and oil paints.

somewhere, an expert mistakes our shine for scales, hypothesizes a history in which we all die
in some spectacle of light, how we emerge from the earth both glowing and remembered.
how the mountain builds itself. how we find ourselves under a new sky and the same endless rain.