I spoke to a lemur
the other day
and he told me how the monkeys came
and murdered his family
I woke up the next morning and
though I had dreamt it
I could hear the trees stretching
groaning and
smothering one another
The insects were no different
waves of hard-shelled killers
the ants I watched at lunch
fought over a scrap of sand
the heads of their enemies adorned their knees
like trophies
and the children of the defeated
became slaves to the hive
above me in the rafters spiders span
death-traps for unwary travellers
their lethal engineering
spanned great empty voids
and spread until it clotted the empty spaces
they bred and bred until all that was left
was one another
then ate until the last curled up
and ended.
