Night arrives on four haunches

when I kick the capsule hatch free 

and flounder through a New Mexican night.

An alpha to my voyeuristic species, 

my claws skitter-scatter 

over a bareback dirt field

away from the smoke

billowing from my cigar roll vessel.

Slap me now. The dominion back home

will lick their gills

as they serve my roasted head 

on a cannibalistic platter

yet here on this blue fleck planet,

my bone-grind legs 

move toward the town lights. 

My skin, a flexible shimmy, 

touches oxygen 

and morphs 

to the disguise of human eyes

like yeast to rising dough

or better yet

a feathered daughter 

spawned within a shell. 

Bread and chickens 

go intergalactic  

don’t you know? 

Off the dust, onto the sidewalk,

I want-must-need

toast and eggs.

The waitress says their eggs

come from a farm

one mile past that water silo

yet the shells stay dry 

under a jelly-thick sun. 

I order them easy, 

which she scribbles onto her notepad 

and sends back to the cook

with a whiskey tongue.

He of course loses the arc of time

like a jail cell key 

to a bad alien’s slippery escape.

I know spacetime 

stretches and crunches 

but still, 

why the fuck are my eggs hard?

I protest by slicing clean

my human facade.

Once my claws shrivel 

up my hermaphroditic anatomy, 

I slither 

to the grease-talking kitchen, 

crack two eggs into a skillet’s crackle, 

and flip them onto a plate

before Pa’s warp drive dies. 

At last, I dunk

dunk my crispy soughdough 

into a yellow ocean.