Letter from a Hunter to a World of Farmers

From lofty pedestals, you tell me that I’m sick, abnormal.
You say my mind’s distorted with disorder, with disease.
You sneer that I’m a weirdo, you complain my brain cells dawdle,
you moan, “Why won’t you swing and somersault on Life’s trapeze?”

You moan, “Why won’t you comb your hair and climb that sparkling ladder
up to a mortgage in the sky and spotless mental health?
Why won’t you woo and date and court and watch confetti scatter?
It’s easy! Why won’t you just be like everybody else?”

You scorn that my attention span is hobbling round on broken
crutches, insist I flood my nerves and shrivel my physique
with Ritalin, amphetamine to nail my eyelids open
until my heart is rattling like a woodpecker’s beak.

But I’m a hunter roving up a hilltop with a notebook
and you’re all farmers hunched behind some numbers on a screen.
I should be sat beside a pile of haddock and a boathook,
not counting out my money in a haze of nicotine.

I should be stalking through a meadow, flinging spears at mammoths
or painting fecund women on a cavern’s bedroom wall,
not racing after metro trains from Monday till the sabbath.
I belong in Paradise. You are Humanity’s fall.

The day that scythes and (so he reckoned) brains began to sharpen,
Mankind began his brother-killing, sceptre-grabbing freefall.
   “And God commanded the man, saying: Of every tree of the garden
   thou mayst eat. But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil

   thou shalt not eat. For the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt die.”
Good and evil. Law. With kings and queens and guns and slavery.
   “And the serpent said unto the woman: In the day ye eat, your eyes
   shall be opened, ye shall be as gods.” (No more shall ye be neighbourly.)

And so commenced your sorghum-smothered, soil-stabbing nightmare,
your diamond-chasing slide into disorder and disease,
the famine in your soul, a valley thick with mental blight where
your tribe and kinsmen’s lives aren’t worth a bag of mouldy cheese.

You burned your sisters at the stake ’cause they remembered nature,
you marched your brothers through a swamp of mustard gas and fire,
you milk your people rake-thin, building factories on a glacier
as you plunge towards the heavens, higher, higher, higher.

And as you soar to Hell’s black chasm, lower, lower, lower,
you’re plotting algorithms, planting microchips in pigs,
you’re brewing murderous viruses and sieving protozoa,
pressing boys and girls to question what’s between their legs.

You puke your poison through the world, through forest, soil and sea,
which teem now with transgender fish and glowing three-nosed mice.
   “And unto Adam he said: Because thou hast eaten of the tree,
   cursed is the ground, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all thy life.

   Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth, thou shalt eat the herb of the field.
   In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground.”
So, on you slog in cotton collars on your treadmill wheels,
all sucking Satan’s hairy balls to earn your precious pound.

You cough your mental virus through the banks, the television,
you sneeze your snotty doctrines through the colleges and courts.
You spit upon your ancestors in soulless malnutrition,
you drug your brains with see-through virtue, self-applauding thoughts.

You offer up your daughters to the bursting bottled cravings
of toxic-minded colonisers from an alien tribe,
castrate your sons with rainbow-coloured dominatrix ravings
and then convince them they’re the luckiest patriarchs alive.

Now women vomit bile at men who follow nature’s rumble.
“How dare you speak to me! I’m brilliant! Stay there on your shelves!”
You’re shepherd, sheepdog and the sheep all rolled into one bundle.
“Everybody, get in line! Stop thinking for yourselves!”

Paradise is lost. You sowed the seeds of Armageddon,
watered a skyscraper, ground the human heart to flakes.
I’ll leave you to your button-prodding sick robotic heaven
where you can play Monopoly with goats and talk to snakes.