Predator 2, ink on paper.

II. Predator

I always predate you. I masquerade in fern and feather – decorously filamented, and fern-feather-footed I pad towards the kill. You’ve scribbled out my face as obscene because it’s the one you see yourself in – raw and meaty you. I carry my booty in the tropics of my belly-bowel, your pretty singing birds, the tropes of every song that moves you. I’m the vehicle of their displacement, the Ur-metaphor for all you stalking artists, so don’t you look aghast at me. All’s gristle to the maw, as we say. You red-of-tooth-and-claw, you acrobatic free-fallers, you fell swoop-and-scoopers – sadistic teasers all. I play out endless I-Spy, oh and then I launch myself hook and line to sink my sabres in. My legs are angels’ dreams of gentleness, just the susurration of breeze in fronds, I prowl. That’s what the stalking is – the shadowing silence of stalks – like the treed army of Macbeth’s nightmare, a massive moving hush, right to the killing fields. I catch in my maw the arrow in its flight that would nail the bird.

Oh, you say, lowering your gaze, I’ve been grown from the ground of my imaging – I’m materially sucked up from the base.

But see now – below us – the shaky struts that bear the banner of our desire.