The still murk rafts its fresh kill to the shore
 in scaly heaps, sockets gaping at steel sky;
  the pebbled banks hoard their bounty
  of salmon, enslaved to self-creating,
  with one purpose: spawn and die;

We are salmon all: telos is ransomed
  by birth-giving, a hostage to future kin,
  who themselves are enwebbed
  in a queasy repetition; cycle-bound,
  all fathers end when sons begin.

 Soft fescue wreathes its felled champion,
  a fine son of the prairie; now his gore
  dews the loamy ground with red-black
  from antler-holes; elsewhere, the rival
  mounts his prized doe: the spoils of war.

We are rutting stags all: tricked into rituals
  of aggression and submission, the [i]agons[/i]
  of rank and status, by inborn urges;
  for Eros, fair and lovely, smiles on strife,
  and with bloody hands moves his pawns.

Role-born, each in its place: some to breed,
  and breed only; some to fight, and fight alone;
  some to seek and gather above; but death
  levels great and small, knows no class here:
  for poison bait crowns the ant-queen's throne.

We are ants all: pacing on tracks enclosed
  and confined, racing to the fated last;
  sorted and typed, but equally unfree,
  pulled along by threads unseen, molded
  once and ever into hopeless castes.

Study nature, and behold you the blind will
  which gnaws the rotten core, Darwin's worm
  which winds through each cell and pore,
  jerking the limbs, forming speech,
  and fouling the mind as it squirms,

Commanding: Eat and fuck and kill,
  strive, compete, survive above all;
  ask not to slip your carbon bonds,
  to soar and touch the unworldly;
  no truth is true which is not banal.

No living thing hath virtue ingrained,
  all guilty of the worm; Christ on earth
  should have preached, not to man,
  but to rocks formed in the time
  before our ur-ancestor's oozing birth
  in primordial slime.