Life on Grendel’s Fen

I have decided to keep this journal so that posterity may wonder and marvel at an unfathomed past otherwise naively and blithely dismissed:

Sabbath...

Ordinary men are guided

By Religion and Philosophy,

Coalesced out of the storms and mists

Of visionaries and madmen. 

Grendel knows neither. 

Testicles and stomach goad Grendel. 

Yet Grendel knows ...

 

Workday...

Factories, anthills of the urban desert

Offices, hermetically sealed

 Outside ...

Black fly

Nasty

Roils in putrid garbage

Copulates

Many nasty black flies’

Larvae dot dog turd

Maggots burrow dead squirrel

Mired in mud

Nasty black fly

Delirious house fly batters

Windex-clean glass pane

Baffled

buzz buzz buzz

Crystal prison

Invisible barrier

Such a fly am I!

Fen-rot feeds fen-life...

Grendel knows

Why need Grendel know of the Phoenix,

Conceit of a desert people?

Morning...

 Sun blossoms out of night-dark,

Humus of expired sun 

Day..

...And night,

Electronic Desert denizens scan pixels,

Sightless,

Uncomprehending of the Fen...

Grendel devours live boar

Squeals; smell fresh blood

Dragon snorts fire

Hissing snake swallows screaming mice

Spastic convulsions; venom

Lady walks poodle on leash

Sightless and Uncomprehending

Grendel illustration by J.R. Skelton

Stories of Beowulf (1908)

Note:

I wrote the text seventeen years ago in 1998, two years after buying our homestead property, which I imagined from the beginning as Grendel’s Fen because of the ephemeral wetland in the far-back acreage- so wild and unvalued by the unseeing masses... but I loved it.

For more in this vein, click on "I Live in a Trailer'"