The Centipede

I sat smoking a cigarette as a centipede

crawled towards me,

its little legs speeding onward with a lively passion

that startled me

so I jumped up and from a distance watched, sickly curious,

my stomach soured by the threat of its closeness, how it seemed

that it might crawl onto me, for a moment

become a part of me.

I could have killed it, ground my heel into its ugly writhing body

but instead I stood over it like a God, smoking and wondering

how something so small and insignificant could race toward death

with such arrogance.

Does it know? I asked myself. Does it know that I'm here?

That my eyes follow its every pathetic creep and crawl?

How the life moving its legs toward me could in a moment be taken

by a single movement from my own mighty legs?

I imagined myself in its millions of little eyes,

Death herself, in billowing clouds of a ghostly smoke.

The centipede could see nothing else.

As I squished the fire out of my cigarette,

I thought perhaps I knew then how God might feel

as she watches the human centipedes creep and crawl

over the world she thought she made:

terror.