Therianthropic Predator / Steven J Burke

I conjure consciousness to you.
I am within you.
I am in your limbs
as you stretch out
at the growling mouth
of your cave, your haven.

I feel contractions
of night’s rejuvenation
released from tendons.
Neck flexes, gaze strains
over the dale’s canopy
to survey your domain.

I gaze out with you. I see with your vision,
A guide to muscle of your keen sight,
motioning mechanics to receive the light
of the dawn, the glow rapidly growing
across the vale. We sense prey
in barely perceived twitches among trees.

I feel the urge in you to feed. I flow
to your brain, then out through nerve-nets
to kick your vital limbs, range forth at a pace
of the urgent, restrained. We descend
from the zenith, your safe secret spy-point,
into the dark crowded and tangled expanse

of dense fecund gorge, tension
increasing, senses now urging
this taut coil, ready
to pounce on a victim
of your first-light hunger.
Our first-light hunger.

I sense the quarry. You smell the prey.
We feel the presence, taste
inherent fear of ever-predated
inexorably fated victim
of hunter’s base urges to feed.
I twitch. You pounce.

We kill.
You feast.
I retreat.

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Steven J Burke is an historian and poet from the north east, living in Leicestershire, UK. He is interested in connections and exchanges between natural and human histories, and interpretations of place, time and identity. His poems can be found in Black Bough’s Deep Time anthologies, Dreich’s Response and forthcoming Messages to the World, and online with Re-Side and The Adriatic Magazine. He can be heard reading on Damien Donnelly’s Eat the Storms poetry podcast.

Twitter: @steven_j_burke