Crocodile Wrestling

Appeared in the Press-Citizen September 11, 2006

In the old B movies, they always come back.
As soon as you’ve dismissed ’em,
forgotten that you’ve flushed ’em down the New York sewer system,
then they go on the attack,

larger, leaner,
and full of terrorist intentions
festering for twenty years in filth and waste that no one mentions.
You don’t find creatures much meaner

than these hissing
lizards laying low lower Manhattan
consuming human beings and the monuments of Modern Man.
Nor does the moral of the cautionary tale go missing

yet still we curse and frown
when the next great anaconda shark gorilla swarm of killer bees
brings the city to its knees
and the towers that we look to for direction smoke and tumble down.