Interrogating the air around his adversary’s nest,
showing abilities one does not casually confess
to him, beastly is more, humanity is less.
Amazing transformations begin and end,
reason and disbelief fail the test.
As the night watches, the man with glazed over eyes transmutes,
pushing ahead of him his ancestors’ stone.
Once fiercely compliant, almost alone, circling old age;
now prowlers and ruffians prefer to stay away,
they believe the night watchman has the Rage;
Though skinned by betrayal, half deaf, showing bone,
if he bites his tongue and tastes the blood, the Rage will come.
Beelzebub follows in the Berserker’s tread,
twenty or more by the end of it dead, and for penance
for weeks he must be motionless, emotionless, alone.
Reading about this precisionless violence, identical in too many ways
to easily take for fable, or dismiss as from a long gone age,
you feel the Field compress around you, almost certain
to leave you very much different than it found you.
Aware of this, you end up facing front on this sideways page.
Away from the protection of not caring one bit if you die,
back where the rage will not submit to purge,
where trying to explain why one will, one will not
fall in to the anger where brilliant and crazy merge,
where our friend the Berserker calls home.