'A Poem In Prose About Barbarism Unreconciled With Thought' Poem by Micheal Valencia

A great hog, stout and powerful in build, a body with impressively defined muscles, sharp and piercing through the skin—I hold in my left hand its marvelous head, purple with a lack of life and trimmed at the ragged, stone-cut edges with moist gore, dripping, newly gouged crimson falling mildly atop a mound of the humid forest’s dried foliage in eerie soundlessness; raised upward, the head extended an arm’s length without, a lusterless eye blankly stares, its opaque gaze compelling me to understand something beyond the instinctual impulses which drive my unevolved existence: I don’t question myself, I don’t look upon my bleeding spear or its hilt remorsefully—I am a savage; this is what I do: but what was this beast—so strong, fighting so courageously in such a state of incomprehensible fear—that I pursued? What did it really know, day in and day out acting and communicating with a cacophony of guttural grunts and snorts? Who am I to feel such a greater being? We have better developed faculties, our forms aren’t vile and grotesque in shape and contour, we are swift and make deft movements on only two legs, our people can make fire and hide-coverings; but how is it to live needless but for sustenance to keep our bodies and friction to keep our species? to be headless of the call to raise this head as my slaughter’s trophy? …But I am a savage; this is what I do: and now, supporting the kill upon my shoulder, I run back to the dwelling where, under the shadowy, cool protection of our den’s overhang, I’ll find the fire flickering and my own kind hungry.