Godzilla/King Kong Rhysling Showcase on April 19, Plus a Poetry Lagniappe

Something new indeed!  So said the email from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA):  We would like to try something new this year to get our members excited about and more involved in the Rhysling Award:  to post about the poets behind the poetry on our blog “SpecPo”.  We would like to post a brief bio, a picture and links to your poems online.  If your poem(s) is/are only available in print, please consider posting them to your own blog or website or an author’s website to which we could link.  Otherwise, we have access to the information and there’s no need to send a picture, bio or the links.  The idea is that six poets per day will be showcased starting on April 1 (which one hopes will not be a foolish omen) and continuing [image error]every other day for about six weeks with, if I’ve read the schedule right, my fifteen minutes of fame, or fraction thereof, on April 19.  At that time — or now as well, I suppose — the SpecPo blog will be able to be reached by pressing here.

Who knows, then, what picture of me they’ll have to post!  What biographical secrets they’ll reveal!  (Of the latter, just in case they’re out of date, don’t forget [*ahem*] I have a novel, TOMBS:  A CHRONICLE OF LATTER-DAY TIMES OF EARTH, coming out in June.)  Or, more to the point, my poem in this pea patch, “Godzilla vs. King Kong,” was published in the print-only journal DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES so where will they find the link to publish?  And so, for that last, why not . . . here (and note a small correction to lines 10-11 should you have the D&N copy with you).

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GODZILLA VS. KING KONG

It came down to this, finally,

the fight of all fights,

Godzilla against the King,

armed with his radioactive bad breath

and his lizard cunning,

while what could a monkey do?

“Do what you do best,”

Kong’s trainer, Fay Wray, told him,

“climb if you can, or else throw feces at him.”

Well, climbing was pretty much out of the question

unless he climbed up Godzilla himself,

the skyscrapers of Tokyo already demolished,

but, vis-a-vis Kong, ‘Zilla wasn’t that tall

and the other plan didn’t seem sanitary.

So Kong made sure he’d had a good night’s sleep,

a hearty breakfast of bananas by the bunch,

then stood his ground in the city’s ruins

delighted when Godzilla, stomping nearer,

slipped suddenly on his breakfast’s discarded peels,

taking a dive, backward, into the harbor.

Godzilla could also breathe under water

so, soon enough, he was climbing back out

dripping mud and dead crabs,

except Kong, by then, had already accepted

the winner’s purse,

and was halfway back to his Skull Island home.