Large Fierce Mammal

The Duel

By LFM

Two men went out to fight one day,
A grave insult to fix.
Too wroth to even fetch their swords,
They settled it with sticks.

Their battle raged throughout the day,
So bent on settled scores,
Their weary seconds pubward went,
And spent three hours with whores.

Returning, as they crested o’er
The hill above the fray,
Such carnage was revealed as made
Them freeze and gasp dismay.

The grass was torn and trampled down.
All the trees were bare.
Nine critters of assorted kind
Lay dead, devoid of hair.

A barn that stood beside the field
They saw no longer stood,
Looking less like structure now
Than piles of kindling wood.

All the crops in nearby fields
Were blighted, scorched, and dead,
And as the two men gaped a crow
Fell spinning, sans its head.

The duellists’ spite was such that while
They fought no thing survived
That came near to their battle ground
Where nought but hatred thrived.

The clouds were dark as dark could be,
The air the hottest hot,
As both men made their timid way
Down to the battle spot.

They heard no sound to mark the place
Their principals were battling.
No lusty oath was on the wind,
No parried stick was rattling.

But then, at last, a path was spied
That showed the way they’d gone,
It passed around a hill and through
A disemboweled fawn.

A finger here, an eyeball there,
A shoe with foot still in it.
The gory path they traced in haste,
Not pausing for a minute.

And finally they stopped in shock,
Their quarry in their sight,
But such a scene had neither man
Expected from this fight.

A flock of ravens marked the place
The hateful hate was ended,
And as they watched, some circled down,
Unharmed as they descended.

A church once stood where now there were
But smoking ruined walls,
Atop of which the ravens swarmed
With loud, excited calls.

The seconds came unto that place
That reeked of blood and death.
Into a hole amid the floor
They peered with bated breath.

In the earthen cellar’s gloom
Two corpses were revealed,
Of angry men possessed of hate
That neither would see healed.

Their sticks long smashed to tiny shards,
Their bodies near destroyed,
Neither man could find relief
From being sore annoyed.

And so as life’s blood drained away
They’d crawled across the ground,
And gasping in a sewage drain
Thumb wrestled ’til they drowned.