PREPARED RESPONSE to being taken

and not returned, naked but for mittens;

laid in the frost and under it.

Small blip in population graph:

result for raptors, sons

of Ares, widely-sown bad seeds.

Yours now the dark behind the one-

way mirror; yours the unlovely

but not unloved remains.

* * *

Readers of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon will get the reference to Ares, whom Stephenson’s Enoch Root characterises as the god of Viking-style mayhem.

I don’t apologize for thinking mythically, rather than sociologically, about the origins of violent psychopathy. I happen to find the myth more plausible than the sociology.