Of Tigers and Vikings and Wicker Baskets

Read quickly reader.

for everything hunts,

is hunted. The snakes will swear

and I don't want to slow us

in our pursuit and retreat, as we are eaten and eat.

So come join the circular race, of chasing and chased.

we join the loop where,

the small hunt and are hunted.

Vampirovibrio bacteria hunt other bacteria

and other bacteria hunt them,

in spite of vampirovibrio's frightening imagery

of pale men

with eyeliner

descending a staircase.

I could spend more time on this, but mustn't lose sight

I don't want to be bitten, but instead want to bite.

so we alight along the ancient arc and see

bacteria are hunted by Nassarius snails,

albeit

very

slowly.

I could make the jump to humans hunting snails -

escargot (with a garum foam made from fish sauce)

but as delicious and delightful as that might be,

it would be rude and unnerving to leave

gaps in our poetry.

So let us progress at prompter pace. Besides...

in our circular highway of the hunt,

Nassarius snails provide avenues to anomalies like

they are named after wicker baskets. Feels oddly emboldened.

Drunken.

Our wolvish wicker basket snails are sought by

Shrews, salamanders and moles

Hedgehogs, lizards and voles.

(Aren't you glad we didn't jump to humans - missing the moles and voles?)

While voles might at first sound like the best route,

their lack of poetic hunters renders them moot,

so we embrace our amphibian nature with candor

and seek the brindled blonde Tiger Salamander

who waits in the wetlands for sumptuous snails

while it breathes softly through its slimy skin.

Salamanders, like glaucous men with patchy facial hair, are terrestrial.

And their love of terrain, will lead to disdain

Since they are hunted by American avocets and their

rusted crowns and convenient assonance.

To clarify, American avocets, with or without assonances

convenient or otherwise,

do not hunt glaucous, inconsistently hirsute men,

but hunt Tiger Salamanders in spite

of their cautionary coloration and

their Bengal predator namesakes.

The avocet's beak, curved upward and windward -

a Viking longship, instilling images of invasion and plunder

but avocets prowl the wetlands

not the North Atlantic, and

salamanders prefer terrain, in spite of disdain.

So the unsuspecting avocet finds itself hunted

by wild boars, which provide no convenient assonance.

but indiscriminate hunting and eating, yet

do not think poorly of our imperial, insatiable swine,

as it grows grand through its wholesale hunting.

Pay homage to these hogs as they are hunted by humans.

Humans are neither

ultimate nor penultimate parts of hunter and hunted,

but mere sectors of the wreath

neither greatest nor least, simply a beast

that rests not at the end, but on a point of the perimeter

where humans are hunted.

But what rough beast, seeking to buffet and bind,

dares hunt our heroic humankind?

Why, the bacteria pseudomonas, psilly,

Cry out that mighty humans yield to no bacilli,

Even their etymology shows faint

they are Latin "false units."

No images of tigers, or Vikings, or

men in eyeliner

descending staircases.

Yet their legions will swarm

cause considerable harm

to our bulbous corpus.

We'll dissolve into simplicity,

under the false unit's unflagging ferocity

which decomposes effectively in spite of its

deceptively gentle nom de plume

or nom de guerre,

I cannot care. I must hurry.

I can hear their rippling flagella flurry.

Yes, the bacilli will take us and have its prey.

Until the circle's next sector's hero seizes the day.