Sub Specie Amiss

Do you ever contemplate
What goes on inside the heads
Where the dark pieces of mind

Make nests out of the same sorts
Of chemistry of the flesh
As functions insides the heads

Of the gentlest, the most kind?
The signaling and storage
Systems are the same, the same

Forms of memory, the same
Core neuroanatomy.
Diversity’s in the mind.

The bodies aren’t that different.
The genomes vary little.
The wants and desires remain

Animal at some level,
Ordinary in most ways,
Mammalian, basic, the same.

But the mind swirls in the sky,
And leaps from fingers and mouths,
And has its own subspecies,

And in some skulls the demons
Are all the better angels
The synapses ever get.