Grass can cut bare skin from five thousand directions
if you give it a good roll. Perhaps
down a verdant hill, trimmed and attended to
courtesy of some Department of Parks.
These places don't just happen naturally.

Or perhaps in an urban absence, a space between tenements
on the side of town where stop signs and traffic lights
pose a personal safety hazard,
where wisened descendents of the ancient prairies
have reclaimed territory by force of growth
giving aid and comfort to their embittered kindred—
the skeletal needles emptied of their essence
and the beer bottles smashed into shards.
Such things cause pain

also. But this is artificial mayhem.
We can track it with numbers. They fill up our memories
in rows and columns, leaving little room to recall
that there are wholly organic means to murder.


"Micro to macro, we have the means to kill you," is paraphrased from a smiliar line in allseeingeye's short story "Diagnosed with 6 months to live, I become a one-man-army."

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