Salty Biochemicals in Ambush

When your chemistry reconfigures
For conflict or for love, chemicals
Don’t first call time out to consider

What kind of social status, what kind
Of mind or career they’re altering.
They course through your blood. They do their job.

The fact that your biochemistry
Doesn’t conform and doesn’t confirm
Your enculturated self doesn’t

Mean chemicals can’t be meaningful,
Carrying out their twenty million
Interactions per second in each

Cell of each body that calls you me.
Chemicals configure attention,
As on the sudden beloved, as

On the sudden enemy. Meaning
Flares like a match, illuminating
The shadowed face that had been unknown

But now matters, passionately,
As your chemistry races your pulse.
How this plays out, given you’re human,

May have everything to do with you,
With social status, career, and mind,
With beliefs, ideas, and local rules.

But when the estuarine crocodile
Whose ancestors ate small dinosaurs
And later ambushed marsupials

Encounters invasive feral pigs
Come down to Mary River to drink,
Opportunity presents itself

In the novel elaboration.
Crocodiles do as crocodiles do,
Even if circumstances are new.