Bright Phonetic Caterpillar

I’ll stand for a drink, i’ll stand for twenty minutes in a queue,
A queue of people, students, think like most students
queuing for a drink, you wouldn’t know
one of these things
is not like the other.

i’ll stand there, perhaps, and for a moment only
rising up with my red hair, lady lazarus in my head,
three times dead, and ash, she said, clams shut,
strings of sticky pearls , enough, enough, while in the queue,
while lining twenty people thick, you wouldn't think
amongst the thrum and the queuing gather that
one of these things 
is not like the other

unconvinced, perhaps:
oh, you,
well -
in the queue three jeweled spiders break out from my chest and nestle lazily
over the polished tubes of beertaps,
oblivious, the students queue while wet and glistening in organ liquor the spiders
knit up webby nets of lace and black
gossamer, slip fine bracken legs underneath the yellow crust of yeast on placemats - hustle
peanuts into lumpy constellations in amongst the lakes of lemonade and
vodka, all amorphous.
and while we queue,
one of these things is not like the other.

it does not stop with that, it is far beyond the shock of glass arachnids, beyond
just chest-born scarlet arthropods.

i stand for twenty minutes, all in the queue,
for drink, and like many in my position, i blend
chameleonic, thanks, i think
Herr Doktor, i owe it all to you,
i do, i do. what do you think? you are a master, doktor.

and as i wait patient, a good consumer,
do you know what i think? beware: i am not like the other.

i can no longer stand
this flesh sack, this unfaithful meat traitor
i want to burst out
out of the jungles and the forests and the plantwork of my soul
i would unfurl some spectral wings, huge, moth-eyed things, brilliant
in their myriad scintilla
scarlet, orange, shocks of purple, and along the edges
acid-green and acid-blue, fragile as images burnt anew on polaroid -
a schizoid glamour - oh, you,
i'm in the queue, i'm in the queue
and at the center, no wretched trunk of failing skin and failing muscle but instead
a pillar, rigid, of polished bone, varnished hornbeam,
feldspar spangled basalt, alabaster, chitin, oak and stone
a spear of hot vanilla fire
would be my core and even then, oh you
around what once was waist no longer hangs a ring of fat,
invincible and true, no longer that, instead
i'd bed down in what once was flesh
carniverous plants, heads rubber-green, their carmine maws would gape and gnash and
eat up killing doubt, oh, you
no unkempt or straying hair, but
curls of red and blue, a golden fin, a crested trojan thing
about my head, arrayed, this halo is of living keratin
i'm standing in the queue, the queue
not something grown out and left for dead but
writhing, gorgon and fluorescent while, i'm telling you
my eyes, white-blue, beyond time, divining, multiple, 
like knifes, in their thin, compound millions, just for the lens-hatched view
the view, the view
i'd asses my wrecked cocoon mechanically
my old flesh body, like a thing deflated, shrivelled, shrunk and empty,
oh you, i wait, i queue,
out of this wrecked cocoon
I would erupt,
some great angry butterfly, all raw and new
meters and meters of uncomfortable rhyme and alien adjective
i'd be tigerstriped and incomparable,
nothing else would do,
i'm long gone from that student queue
oh, you

i'd leave earth,
find a space in the moon, lunatic,
grow anaerobic gardens and tend wierd plants - shave beardfruit,
propagate teethflower lovingly, water space/time tubers with
liquid hydrogen and nurse the wrecks of long forgotten satellites
into an orchard of metal ghosts, a sputnik forest
i always spin jungle

instead of death, instead of aging, i'd ossify,
fix
stella wind would find my lightless, rocky stasis and i'd
crumble off into silicate and compounds of calcium
iron pyrites
in the sea of tranquility i'd be a statue
a pillar of salt,
and then, at peace, disintegrate

oh you, around me throng the student body, and in this student throng i wait
i wait
this queue is twenty people long and underneath my human cover, i state
objectively that one of these things
is not like the other
i state
one of these is things is not like the other.