Enter the bourbon and mint-laced breath
of murmuring seducers, the tender savagery of their profiles,
the ready graze and poetry
of their stealthy, tapered
fingers. Enter self-proclaimed saviors, diamond-encrusted
messianic antichrists, their sticky ill-gotten, ill-begotten gains.
Enter the transpersonal gaze
of their benevolent eyes—brackish
and softly distant—the color
of cold wet sand.
Enter ruthless arrivistes, masochistic agonists, bliss-seekers, the ever-diminishing returns of their ecstasies. Enter the carnivores
and the plant-based meat eaters with the rust of blood
on their hands. Enter the lambs,
the innocents, the sullen, gangly, achingly beautiful adolescents
pulsing the blinding searchlight of their precarious innocence.
Enter the soft-downed ducklings pecking out of their translucent shells
under the artificial suns of heat lamps in the hatcheries, imprinting
forever to their duck hunters.