serai

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I wrote this years ago in response to a poem an online friend wrote. Thought folks here might get a kick out of it.

Predators

and what are men but smooth jaguars
lying furled and sated over the corpses they make of us
as we sweetly, sweetly bleed
our lives running in calm rivulets
over claws nestled closely in our flesh?

what are they but great delicious bears
licking their muzzles clean of the honey
they’ve stolen from our guarded hives?

when do they not kill us,
when do they not tear us to shreds
obliterate us
and send our souls reeling into
that red red fate
where we are nothing
if not willing to go?

how comes such sweet murder encased
within those sculptures of flesh
lines and planes and
smells of yeasty bread
rising to the heat of our eager ovens
and the sparkle of eyes and teeth and
rough demanding hands
all supple and soft to our cries?

why do we spread ourselves so
open upon the altar
to their sacrificial knives
happily begging to die
screaming our deaths in
fast sulphurious joy
crying out to whatever god
has ears to hear that
happy slaughter
the death that comes only
in life?

what are men but priestly panthers
hypnotic and hidden in the wild landscape
amber eyes glowing over limbs
hotly folded
rumbling deep their lava song
and eventually asleep
above the kill?
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