It keeps you caged, the eye of the hurricane, the sullen, sodden promise you try to keep as you haunt the rain forsaken,
and in these latter days I wonder whether those you love, their lives fading, are enough to shield you from the gun. Some would say
that even after I should keep sharp teeth, a heart beat, yet I always wonder why they never see to live is to embody death.

And in the scope of my rifle, there upon the truck with flies buzzing all about and memories of the mezzanine silk and the king who
extolled his great hunts and the many stuffed heads that looked down baleful from cool and distant perches of silver flecked marbled
crushed velvet sepulcher it occurred to me that this lion, devourer of many, this maned master of the Savanna whose huge head tested
monsoon air heavy with rain, acrackle with thunder, knew not the guns of Britain, nor Hitler's panzers, nor Fat Man or Little Boy or the
story book a doting parent reads to one's daughter or son. In that moment, as I pull the trigger, I am not a man or a weapon.
I am the living, ruthless pulse of the world, and we are one.