Partial Scores From The Cultural Wars by JB Mulligan

The noble savage
roasting the brain of Rousseau
in its skull, eyes alert
as flames, inquisitive
of the dangerous dark –

this is the Adam
in an atheist’s Eden
before the fall
into shop and office.

As much of a myth
as the Bible’s first son
mud-spawned and breathed upon.
Voices ring like swords
together, vicious
under the studio lights.

And the true Adam?
The missing link?
It awoke to yet
another morning
under a slightly younger sun,
scratched itself and shivered.

Sometime in an afternoon
a spark was struck –
from the sky?, from the friction
of impulses rubbing on each other? –
and a creature blinked,
looked around, looked up
and went on.

Bright fossils leap in the mind
as the bonehunter scratches the dirt.

JB Mulligan has had poems and stories in several hundred magazines over the past 40 years, has had two chapbooks published: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, and two e-books, The City Of Now And Then, and A Book of Psalms (a loose translation from the Bible). He has appeared in several anthologies, among them, Inside/Out: A Gathering Of Poets; The Irreal Reader (Cafe Irreal); and multiple volumes of Reflections on a Blue Planet.