My Cousin (?) The Lobster Poem by Bryan Riley

After I had contemplated
all the possible delights
of the internet garden,
searching for things I would
have no later use for, I
reflected for awhile on the
strangeness of the
previous night's events-

In my dream it was the
lobster, hunched on the
beach, singing a haunting
song about his homeland,
waving his already-manacled
claws in three-quarter time
at the incoming tide- He was
turning red; perhaps from
the sun, perhaps from an instinctive
memory of the thousands of his
brethren marching into thousands
of pots of boiling water before
him- maybe it was anger

It is believed, according to
some, that lobsters can feel
pain- that lobster biology is
similar to human biology.
But can they feel angst?
The pining quality of the lobster's
song would seem to suggest it.

And so the lobster, perhaps
yearning back toward the
cretaceous, that time long
before the boiling pots, is
just a smaller version of
myself, my own shackled hands
hovering just above the
empty page, preparing to
write a sonnet the
world will never hear.