He rustles the grist
Of his laboured dreams
Searching for undying love.
A thing he knows not:
Its contours elude him.
His anger and revenge
His brashness
Trip over its traces
Never rumbling to its core conceits
Its shy extending metaphors.
His fist is clenched with pain.
Loud, unknowing
This brutal boy
Locks his body tight
Into that self-satisfied chromosome
Each dying fall, a deadly end
No patriarch can mend:
His fist then strikes the wall.
Like the braying hunter
(Unlucky in love)
He flails into failure:
Genetically rude.
The bewitching mess
Of emotion’s caress
Beyond his drearest ken.
Here, complexity and acumen
Are but coupled strangers
Best forgotten
Like the dropped catch
On the playing fields
Of his ramshackled youth:
His fist soon clenched with rage.
As he felled the trees
He touched the sky
And forged his own demise:
Stung with implacable greed
Every power repeated
Raping the land of its sweetness.
His fist is empty handed.
His roaming days undone.
Deluded. In his mind
The hearth now beckons.
“Let me in” he cries!
His dogged fist bangs the door!
Who listens to this violence?
Who hails his shadowy might?
Not the wan survivors.
Now: like a dinosaur
He roams the knackered earth
Shafted by the crudest light.
Tis the end of the Anthropocene
May 2022