Some dormant and unshakable fiber
of man’s being, abetting deepest from the primordial rungs linking the double-helix-shaped
ladder of life itself, one imperceptible of a faraway prominence of morality, one
darker than the barren, beady pupils of his scanning and squinting sight, rests
tainted with a rooted desire to kill that which exists wildly in Nature. That which roams elsewhere, somewhere, yet
somehow, amidst the range of his own conceivable world, whether openly-seen or
estimated in the unknown. That which he
knows to be evermore dominant in form or elegant in appeal or naturally-majestic
than he could ever physically claim or imaginatively hope or suggestively strive
to be, but nevertheless, lurking undetectable below the shallow surface of skin
that surreptitiously masquerades his civilized mannerisms, dwell these haunting
and immutable remnants of his once-atavistic survival mechanisms of past, his
primitively hard-wired leanings, a wildly-determinate proto-programming clawing
to advise his rudimentary inclinations that he unshed mystery and domesticate
any said death-dealing thought to any said waiting creature of fin or fur or
feather from the spheres of his own existence, those stirred from that
innermost dimension of his ravenously-seeking mind, or even benefit a
subconsciously-clenching vestige affirming the incarnate chomping contours of
his pointed prehensile canines, for as he sees, it can only subsist as fur-hide or scale-wrapped compromise, this
faraway contention of game-sport subjugated to merely consummate his own satisfying
sense of self-dominance and professed masculinity within a competing world of
predatory rivalry. A prize, as he sees, defining
the overestimated value of his very own self-worth and fixated importance of an
assumed or self-imposed contest amongst the spying eyes and trying hands of
fellow mankind.
He hunts the hunter, lowering
himself into the hunted’s world, such that by agony of such stalking consequence,
the bearing of any said beast’s breath, that incomprehensible, yet empathetic exhalation
that is cosmically-ordained common-life shared amongst the very inhalations
with man himself, one violently heaving for mercy in a pitiless, smearing extirpation
of bleeding-blood, one tormented in an asphyxiating finality of foaming bubbles
of mouth agape, becomes stolen, its surging pulse forever stalled of wicked and
wayward privilege, as it bears burden, and as he hovering witness, to one last
writhing twist or percussed, slapping strike of tail or soaring, visceral moan
or earth-tearing slash of hoof. A pitiful
finality consummating by way of an ancient conception born from the emergent
turn of time and life’s carnivorous collision thereof, that as these eyes see
it, is the silhouette of man strengthened by the rigor mortis of conquest, an
exalted and exclaimed delusion of dominance only to perish immediately itself, one
muted by the deafness of a world disinterested.
A world infinitely larger than the parameter of his mind’s mirage of
purpose purports. A world one-less punctuated
by the miraculous grandeur of sinew’s sinuous living color. One less lowly or
removed victim from a universal transcendence.
For he is hunter. He is savage
beast himself, grown stained and weighted with the sticky, salty smear of a sanguine-silence
bleeding outward unto his own dying stillness of reason. He is man.
The ungodly proctor of flesh’s fate and peerless purveyor of death.
