Fire Eye

Long-haired, unshaven—face and limb—
Clothed in dirt and belted with the wind,

Can you imagine the earliest of them
As a mix of unmatched women and men,

Borne by some spontaneous combustion
Burning in early sedentary civilizations?

Foragers have no mendicants, nomadic
Pastoralists no redundant wanderers,

Not like these—deliberate renunciants
Of what then was only just begun,

When the most ancient towns counted
Spans in centuries, few of them written.

Hardly had any humans settled down
And dug in for the long cultivation since,

The mycelial extensions of domestication,
Than some began to resist and lament,

Incapable, as are all humans, of living
Without even a little community support

But unhappy dwelling in swelling towns,
They meandered, they begged, they cried

Bitter complaints—they invented
The desperate, ascetic version of holiness

They pretended was meant by resistance,
Which was a lonesome, unkempt, half-fed

Way of saying, No, no, no we want to live,
But we don’t want to live like that.