Platypus Jowls

Platypus jowls
: next time someone yells out in frustration
and I’m around,
“Platypus jowls.”

I’ll say it, is what I mean,
as a defense mechanism, not for me
but for society (so grand, so grand); just blurt out
“Platypus jowls,” and then

they’ll look at me, bemused,
and I’ll just be there in my
five dollar shirt and
raggedy pajama pants and
my ragtag band of chin hairs
wriggling fast and thick
(either they or the hairs,
‘t don’t matter) and they’ll
and they’ll just keep staring
or or repeat what they just said
maybe
a little less angry perhaps
because confusion is the beast that feasts on emotion                  (hah!)
and nobody will have heard them. All ears have been struck to stone
with two words, with two words not mine but of the people, of all people, of
the heavens maybe–of the heavens perhaps. No one even remembers

what a platypus is

.

Do they still exist?
even exist?
Did they ever exist?

We feel the word tunneling into our cheeks. We hold them, warm in our palms,
wondering when it was exactly we gave birth to all these jowls.