This side of the water-line everything is beetles,

on the other, the kingdoms of crabs, all else

are sports, dead-end prototypes, and us.
The startling dominance of it, the inevitable

reordering to the type: un-shucked, re-burdened,

the great evolutionary retreat to the form.
I started this with a thought for shells, for

carapaces, their self-evident superiority; why

else would nature tend towards chitin?
I thought to write something predictable about

vulnerability, about the strength in our softness,

the triumphs inherent in our weakness. I might still.
But this week the news is full of tanks, the men

crowded in them, the men that have sent them,

their mud-mired convoys, the shells they discharge.
The news is full of stories of farmers hitching

their rusty tractors to tanks and dragging them off

the road. Second-hand tanks selling on eBay.
It’s funny for a day, but where are all the tanks

coming from? A phylum I’d thought abandoned

long ago. Extinct. Hammered into ploughshares.
No useful form ever fails if it fills a niche.

Turn over any log, scrape the ocean. So now

my Timeline is filled with hard shells rutting a field.