To kill the snake

Listen.

Do not envision the snake's head, or eyes, or tongue; if possible, do not perceive the snake at all as you grab its head, ignoring the spires of its body coiling endlessly on your forearms and shoulders, its tail whipping your face in vain reproach.

Do not envision life of the loss of life; the snake is beyond the Pale.

If possible the same attitude should be held for the boot or the baton which will eventually crush the snake thin, yet elaborate skull. Suffice to say the more we smudge the border between cause and consequence the safer we'll be from the Authority and its inane inquiries.

And yet it looks at you with its glossy non-mammalian eyes and you can't feel any particular burst of hate or fear in the dephts of those beads. The snake is, after all, perceiving you, and it is evaluating you in the bigger-badder model, or reading its venom glands, or enlarging its digestive tract in the hopeful proposition of catching you in a stranglehold to digest you later, ever so slowly, at a snail's pace. You see, the snake deserves it.

And you have decided to put the snake down to the grassy meadow. And your skin is strained red in several places, in the fashion of scales and spires, spires and stairs, and your eyes are hurting, and you no longer hold the boot or the baton, you cannot even grab the coral handle of the skinning knife, it's just you and the snake and the grass and the loss of life; today we're all beyond the Pale.

You are guilty and the snake is guilty and to kill the snake is to kill yourself.

You watch it slither away in the misshapen wild grass knowing full well it'll come back to haunt you and that one day the whole meadow will be a carefully eviscerated plot of land for semi-detached houses of suburbia in Somewhere Wisconsin.

You cry but there is really no need for your melodramatic tendencies in here. We know you were never really supposed to kill the snake, to press the button, to vote at the ballot. It's in someone else's hands now, out of yours for sure, but by all means feel free to rebrand yourself in lieu of this experience, like a novel Odin hanging from the world tree, not replaced yet, not popularized yet, not emasculated by some grubby handed christian monk with free time and ink.

We will live in the snake we will live in the snake we will live in the snake and we'll never press that button again.