Finding a fit

The tail of the dragon is long,
Bearing ridges, serrated edges, the marks of a thousand vanquishings.
Would it covet the length of its appendage so much as reflect on its provenance?
But the dragon is unfeeling, we know... and unthinking
Didn't I read today about dinosaurs
And their inability to recognise, from sight or smell,
The toxicity of the flowers that would bring about their demise.

Are we better off
In the now, then, and forever more,
When we barely ward off the danger of our potency
While we revel in the puzzle of our mortality?

Why do I see the mentally ill, the psychologically wanting, the pathologically inclined
In every little morsel of 'content' that I consume?
Are we becoming better at recognising the germ of our own self-destruction
And describing it... in song, dance, and animation
A little too vividly for anyone's cultivated comfort?

After all we are creatures of the gag reflex...
How else would we have survived
The terrifying exigencies of war,
The stark emergency of grief,
The lonely abyss of existence,
The narrow, stifling fact of form?

What is normal, anyway?
The usual and comforting facade of fear?
The car in the driveway, the bloodied knife at the butcher's
Hidden from the prying eyes
Of kids who tallied too long at their first dissection?

Would I the luxury of perpetual arrival
In foreign lands at the dead of night
Staring down a forked road whose outlines barely to discern
One way to defeat
And the other, to a benumbed despair.