The Replicator

I will contemplate you with the lion’s eye:
No weakness escapes the measuring.
Your gallant sinews dissolve at my approach.
The unrest in your veins
Is balanced
On the tooth’s colossal edge,
On the calculation of an offspring minute
Begat by a million-year-old father.
What is this that pulses with the rhythm of interminable seasons?
How far back before the benign eye’s triumph?
I decipher tomorrow by the twisted codes of my mothers:
This is the heirloom of being.
I am slaved as a link to the blood-chain
Of this or that replicator,
To the rise, not the fall,
And you, my sweet:
Your flaws lie sprawled across a brutal lens.

(c) Rhett Talley