The Extinction

Pompei and the Vesuvius, photo by author.

You woke up from a profound sleep and saw that your hands had turned into two of the most beautiful orchids. These fascinated you.

You went out walking through your giant deserted city, as if bewitched and proud for being, at least partly, orchids.
Yet, you knew that such flowers are ephemeral, so you feared for their ending. Thus, from your arms stuck out green leaves so you might be sure that, if the orchids had to go away, the vegetable as a whole would remain. Someday new fresh orchids should sprout once more from your own body.
Orchids, however, need trees as support for growing.
Your arms jumped out from you, changed into two big trees.
Those flowers had, from then on, their lives assured.
Astonished, you looked at those plants that formerly had been your arms and hands and continued your walk adrift.
Some city-blocks farther, all of your hair fell at once to the ground. Each one of your hairs became then a strong earth worm that pierced, melted, and changed asphalt into earth.
Your left leg's skin became thick like scales. This limb of yours detached from you as a huge boa. You at once imagined it could eat up your whole body, but that animal didn't pay any attention to you, creeping in the opposite direction, as you did.
Your ears became exuberant butterflies, vividly colorful.
Your right leg was lost, too, turning into a pretty iguana couple.
You thought you'd never lose your own brain, but a hole opened on the top of your head, on your infancy's fontanel, and then all the contents of your skull were felt to be dribbling over your body as abject slugs, cockroaches, and round- worms.
Nonetheless, you went on thinking and feeling everything with cruel voluptuousness.
From your opened navel, your viscera could finally jump out. Your bowels assumed a queer and grotesque shape of a weed that you had always abhorred. They fell to the ground, took roots, and grew green. From your spleen sprang up a bull that began to graze just aside from whatever still remained from you. Your pancreas leapt up into the air, transformed into a hen. Your kidneys into two bats. Also your liver flew away, like a big vulture, which laughed ironically at seeing your remains, told you good-bye, and headed straight for the Caucasian Mountains.
Your bladder bloomed into a huge mushroom.
You lost your face and your whole skull became occupied by an enormous turtle. Before this, your eyes had already gone away as two firefly's clouds.
Still wandering through your city's great desert, you remained enraptured by a merciless ecstasy.
Your spinal column went toward the sea, changing into countless lobsters, craw-fish, crabs, and shrimp.
You stopped to breathe, because your lungs had become a couple of copulating dolphins.
Your heart was unable to change into anything but a single housefly.
Almost all of what remained of your skin became huge clumps of foliage; what remained of your muscles became dozens of small lizards.
Nonetheless, you were still alive, excruciatingly feeling everything.
Only when your male genitals at last freed themselves from you, changing into the most splendid bird that you had ever seen, were you able to see that there wasn't any place on Earth for you. You were finally dead.
Extinct.

                      ΩΩΩ

This poem has been also published on medium. Click below:

https://medium.com/lit-up/the-extinction-ddb2afa652df

Click here for a sample of 'The Last Owl', a novel containing this tale.

     
    

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