Poem for a Predator
       

Do you hate me or crave me past sanity?
Either causes the pleasant and polite
to wolf down
                        others' lives. I need to leave,

take an aimless wander by the harbor,
its field freckled with pairs of sunbathers,
a circle
                of blithe retirees in lawn chairs

gabbing and smoking and ranting and laughing,
a man lobbing a ball for a Labrador, kneeling
to bear
                hug him when he gasps it back—

My soul has no use for this human kindness
today, wants to gaze through the surface
of this
                water, the overcast sky's mirror,

look with her violent eye through the placid
black artifice edged with grey wavelets,
imagine herself back
                                      home into that world:

Creatures preying on one another
for no good reason, only instinct, living
and dying out
                            of neither shame nor abhorrence.

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Copyright © 2017 Michael Collins All rights reserved
from Appearances
Saddle Road Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission