Steel Tiger

There's a steel tiger running low in the skies
striped with charcoal and breathing smoke
with glass fangs and grave-marker eyes.

Over the ash-hills where the warbirds rise
and porcelain flowers fell, scattered and broke
comes the steel tiger running low in the skies

past charnel fields, amid swarms of flies.
The dead don't breathe and the living choke
under glass, with graves marked in their eyes.

The master and maker of the steel device
reaches a casual hand up to stroke
the steel tiger as it runs low in the skies--

stares at a bloody wrist-stump in surprise,
while the tiger grins at an endless joke,
baring glass fangs marked with engraved eyes.

Too late now for the maker to realize
he cannot control the thing that wears the cloak
of a steel tiger running low in the skies
glass-fanged and gravid, marked by all eyes.