Evolution
When young Charles rode the
Beagle round the Cape
bound for the revelations of the
Galapagos,
little did he know that war and
rampant
radiation would turn this
continent
he circumnavigated into a land
which would first prove his
theories of survival
and selection,
not in millennia but months,
and with like rapidity prove them
as useless as Newton ’s linear equations
to the curving temporal
attenuations of space.
And now even his special island is rife
with protean life and the unique
and isolated species he once
cataloged with such care
have vanished
in an onslaught far more
unique and constantly changing,
more fertile than flights of
pure imagination.
Expansion
From space, with each revolution
of the planet,
the dark arboreal palimpsest
seems to lengthen.
In the time lapsed motion of
satellite tapes,
it swells like a gargantuan
amoeba in mitosis.
which survive do so by a daily
confrontation.
The lines of armor clad troops
advance warily,
spraying gouts of liquid fire
into the wilds.
Napalm. Cyanogen. Agent Orange. A poison rain
of defoliants and excoriation
falls in waves
from the decks of combat planes
and choppers,
yet the flames are strangely
dampened and die.
In a makeshift refugee camp, a native
from the abandoned interior,
drafted to fight,
sleeps in battle fatigues by his
pregnant wife.
All his dreams have been
transformed to frights
in which the serpentine vines he burns by day
have rooted deep within their
displaced lives,
to twine and strangulate the
bloody umbilical
and suffocate the breath of his
unborn child.
Elan Vital
Beyond the claws of bestial
battle,
beyond the green on green
attrition,
some say a force is dwelling
here
which links its manifold
creations,
a rank and raging barbaric
spirit,
a dim but still awakening
sentience,
which touches and taints our souls
and gives rise to stray
obsessions.
The banks of thunderous cumuli
stacked against the Andes range,
fall east to meet miasmic mists
which rise in streaming drifts
from the swamps of lowland
basins,
and in this airborne compilation
dense and brackish figures
evolve
in an endless surreal
cinemontage
of unconscious organic visions.
Some say that far and farther south
beyond the Rivers Negro and Parana ,
beyond the encroaching
vegetation,
a retreating tribe has suffered
an enchantment and possession
in the shadow of the forest
wall,
for now they divinate its growth
and foretell our changeling
future
as they read the clouds’
collisionsClick Below to read
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of Fantasy and Science
FICTION
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