Cockroach

Blackly armoured as a dictator's funeral,
arch-survivor so easily crushed by my foot,
you die as you lived, without expression,
squat body, fine carapace, fusing or sundering.
I know a further million of you wait—
the underground sea on which this house floats.
While I was gone, you tracked each plate, pot, cup,
dining on the ghosts of past meals; invaded
sealed crates of books, a ghostlier sustenance.
Moving with the illusion of slowness
then cannily absent, you often subvert, outwit.
Sometimes, I find you in dreams, or odd pockets
of the self—just there as if to say:
I cannot be transformed, kill me or endure me.
Remember, nothing describes me but what I am.
And don't write poems about me.