The species he’d just been and the one he was now
had never coexisted, he knows from reading.
He thinks this means that now he is in No Time.

He feels sulky in his immense and Saurian self,
each ponderous step one hundred paces of scampering
when he had been, till Tuesday past, a squirrel.

‘Think back,’ he tells himself. He thinks he thinks.
The time before the squirrel, what had he been?
Book reader, but what more? And what were books?

On the edge of something (maybe, nothing’s sure)
he assembles what were reasons some lives back.
Rhyming — what was that? — had seemed so pure.
Now he is less than bothered by its lack.

‘Or lack of lack,’ he giggles. A morass quakes.
He takes a step, another, and one more.
He plunges, wallows in the wake he makes
as his expanding body nears a shore.

Or edge. Or crevice. Chasm! Nothing’s right.
His body, just now massive, turns to light.