Hawks

Hawks love winter and the smell of death, riding on bonfire winds, dancing in cancerous snow flurries, hanging razor icicles on overflows, hawks love this aroma. It’s not like napalm in the morning, or the perfume of glory, more the sewer whiff of old mustard gas, of dead sheep bloated with bad oxygen, of flesh surrendered to decay. Not like kerosene and detergent, fire and fairy liquid, throat-scouring clean, nasal passage acrid, pretty red and phosphorous green to the eye. Not like that at all. Hawks are hunter killers, black marbles for eyes, beaks like stitched wounds, wings like feathered shrouds, spines like lightning conductors. Hawks love such terrain, wastelands of possibility, tactical genocides, surgical strikes pecking orders. They love winter and the smell of death like a lark’s tongue mistress, a carrion lover betrothed, a feral nightmare, a neuropath dream, or the favourite ghost of ideology and empire passing unto dust.