ANIMALS

I saw them verywhere in the city the past two days. The animals. Some were dead on the road, some were slinking across streets beneath cars in the night. I live in a city, a real, live, teeming city full of concrete and buses and places of pleasure, yet there were wild animals at every turn.

Hawks dived down towards windows, possums lay dead in the road, skunks sprayed the night, feral cats prowled like panthers and the crows were flying in packs.

They were out and they were everywhere and something deep in my soul tells me that it's a sign of something and of something that's not quite right. Don't ask me what it is because I don't know yet. I just feel it inside.

We live in interesting times, to paraphrase the Chinese expression. Things have been turned on their head in the world and people around me seem content to lose themselves in some fantasy moment of bliss, telling themselves that there is some magic or magic man that will make it right. And they keep on living as they have, spending and playing as if the illusion were not an illusion and the good times had no price.

The angels have started to fall and the ground beneath us is starting to rumble. That sounds crazy, but I believe it. Maybe I'm just tired. Maybe I'm just not in a good mood. Maybe this whole thing will pass...

But there's the animals, untamed, unleashed. Nature has gone wild. Just before I sat at my desk to write this, I saw a brutal sight. I watched a crow swoop down and kill a sparrow. Like an arrow he flew into his prey, bit into the sparrow's flesh, feathers floated around him like lost souls.

As I turned from the scene, a possum crawled out from a sewer. His mouth was bloody from the remains of what he'd just eaten.

I need to talk to my little Cristo.