Bellicose Dusk

By Rich Boucher

There is only one state in all of the one America
that possesses hot, arid desert lands, and it is right here
that the sinful, cruel and incredible cycle of nature
plays itself, repeatedly, on repeat throughout the heat
that blisters us all with blisters in the smorching, nasty day.
The wild heron swoops down from high on high,
his long, mottled nature bird neck flexing strongly
in the descending air, landing by the morning sun
upon a moaning, freshly-died dead deceased carcass,
and the ravenous bird promptly rips into the hide
of the motionless, furry brown creature with his teeth,
rending tendon and drilling through accessible bone
to reach the life-giving blood and scrumptious marrow.
It is eight in the morning on the only desert floor
in the topographical United States, and nature takes
its bloody, unstoppable, nightmarish and evil course.
The sun moves now to the eleven a.m. position,
the way it does nearly every day, and the fearsome heron,
that terrible, rude scavenger, he keeps on tearing away
at the largeful, abundant carrion for daily sustenance,
using his tricky little paws to dine on still-warm organs.
The hour is now at the two o’clock hour, a few feet Wester
than it been earlier. Oh, this heron! How it grasps the slick
bloody entrails, morsel-like, in its deft and sharp pincers,
positioning them close enough to its snout so as to feast.
And feast, feast it does, like a monster, as all the blessed animals
are in their inherent design quite godless and calamitous.
The mouth part of the pile of no-longer-living carrion
cries out, even though dead, in pain and desperate despair
as the heron, awful in his own wicked and unsaved splendour,
continues to claw and shove his horn into the bloody meal.
And the Sun, like us, spins on, blazing at a few million hot degrees.
When five o’clock rolls at long last around, all of humanity
(without any exception at all) gets into their cars and drives,
hurtling towards a place that they call a home. Not the mighty
and varlet heron, though, who at this hour uses his impressive thumbs
to pry apart the victimized skull of the once-roaring big beast.
The cool night air, in the one and only existing American
desert (which again is only in just one state in the union)
carries with it the scent of death, and musk, and hope at eight
at night, and that savage miscreant, the indefatigable heron
listens intently for the sound of buffalo marching distantly
under the sure, white, twinkling, implacable and careless stars.
The bird’s antennae twitch, seeming to register a chance for red risk,
intrigue and opportunity lo those few miles away, and he furrows
his unkempt, bushy black eyebrows with clear and apparent interest
and emotion, bordering on what many science people would call curiosity.
He will not go, though, as he is still feasting on the poor, unalive food.
It is now the night version of eleven o’clock, and with one sly
and deliberate flick of his wrist, the heron flings uninteresting gristle
to the side and continues even on into the pre-witching hour
with his awful and damnable snacking. The carrion, long since
very dead, has ceased to whine, waiting now to just be eaten in full
before assuming spiritual form and rising when the coast is clear to Heaven.
The heron does not regret that he is not an egret,
or some other bird: he is what he is and he actually knows this;
he feasts on the delicious dying dead things that perish to provide him
with nutrients that taste like blood and wildness.
And we humans are what we are as well,
and we know full well that we are what we are,
and we all do exactly the same thing.

Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in Eighteen Seventy, Cultural Weekly, Drunk Monkeys, Manzano Mountain Review and Bending Genres, among others. He is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me, a collection of poems published by Jules’ Poetry Playhouse Publications and serves as Associate Editor of BOMBFIRE literary journal. He loves his life with his love Leann and their sweet cat Callie.