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| Image: windowlicker by M0L0D0Y at Deviant Art |
Distraught at the news of machetes and truck bombs,
shooters and hostage-takers, scrolling through death tolls,
searching out agency, this man mutters, kill them all,
mutters round them up. He curses and bangs, yet
flees the first splash of film carnage, protests I am too
tender, faints at the needle tugging blood. He looks
no different than any other man, sleeps with his feet
tucked beneath his dog, goes any distance for a friend,
caresses his wife, hugs his children. He’s a man as
ordinary as the leaf litter around the den of a trapdoor
spider, but trespass there, even lightly, and out he snaps.
What darkness in him awaits its trigger, what holds him,
palps at the ready? He swears it isn’t bluster, but I
deny it, hoping that the humanness of his prey would
disarm him, that compassion would leave him hungry.
Surely, the cunning of his design was not made for this.
Devon Balwit wears many hats in Portland, Oregon. Her poetry does likewise. Some homes it has found: TheNewVerse.News, Leveler, drylandlit, Birds Piled Loosely, The Fog Machine, The Fem, Dying Dahlia Review, The Yellow Chair, The Cape Rock, The Prick of the Spindle, Of(f) Course, txt objx, and 3 Elements.
