You know what gerbils are?
Little animals, Creative Play I think sells them.
"The gerbils keep having babies and eating them,
so that you find dreadful hunks on the bottom of the cage.
Last night when the humans were making love,
the male and female were both on their treadmill racing
wildly into the darkness, faster than you and I could even
think of, but this morning there are more babies and pieces
of babies.
The children of animals that small
look like tiny complete men, before the mother
tears into them.
Why she does it, is because we're there watching.
And it hurts how we look at things,
and she feels it from us.
The pain, that we are in such fear
that we can't live except in the darkness,
groaning and thrashing.
The terrified animals inside us, that
are like men too fleeing into the eternal undergrowth.
Human beings have children.
Pat them, teach them to talk, to protect themselves,
to have more, more, but we still die when we look at each other.
This is the wheel, the gods, the whiteness, the clear air.
This is the gnawing in cages, trying to take the life back.
The violent wanting to throw up and refusing to.
The wheel and the seed, the heart shattering."