They are the All-Father’s wasted children.
They do not fear an untimely demise for they are already dead.
Once hanging, as he, from figure four limbs,
Now, nature's vampires,
moving over the earth in something between life and death.
Before I can stop to let them go by he scatters them with a fading, feeble hand.
Angry and cut away the leaves blow across the road in sprawled packs like lemmings compelled to a cliff.
Without warning or even so much as a 'ready, set, go' they change both pitch and mind then fly out in front of me.
It is a game to see how many make it to the other side before my tires run them over.
Some make it, others don't.
Afterward I look behind to see that the flattened ones have resurrected themselves in defiance,
laughing in their dismemberment,
howling fury like the maddest of hatters
they rejoin their daft brothers on the road's edge to wait for another silly human in another steel coffin.
In front of me, they form rings and mimick their All-Father, dancing a dust devil's jig.
Mindful of nothing but themselves they throw dry, water-moistened bodies into the dance without regard.
Oblivious to all,
caring for nothing
and open only to their kin.
Moments later in another turn of my journey,
they form
and with a
WHOOSH!
attack in a twist of will and in lifting assault.
As I wonder what I did to annoy them they slam themselves against my course,
mad with their ant's force of will against my elephant truck's astonishment.
They go,
They have always gone,
Into the bogs,
into the fires of the volcano,
tumbling down headless from the temple pinnacle . . .
no matter how the madness of death and impetus of life flings them forth,
they go happily,
Insanely,
to burial, restraint and sleep.
There, the All-Father entombed in slumber, dies so to wake at the door of spring
and greet his bride with howls of hope for the harvest.
Back to the Now World,
forcing my eyes to notice through their Pyrrhic compulsion they blow forward in wave after wave.
Miles later and yards ahead . . .
from nowhere they leap out then dart back in a ‘nyah-nyah-nyah’ chorus sung by nature's mad children.
I can almost see them stick out their pointed, dry tongues and wag their stemmed behinds at me as I pass
sitting there
quite safe,
back on the road's edge.
They want me to know,
They force me to know,
That this is their day,
and the Mother's breathing wind is their playground;
The Father’s sweet corpse,
their own dancing berth.
