Every creature ever. Every single one was there.
Every animal that ever existed. Everyone
who ever existed. All life of the animal kingdom
but without hierarchies. A kingdomless kingdom.

Not even the vaguest notion of kings or ladders.
Not a species-based filling in of the catalogue,
but rather each and every individual
in a state of co-existence, eternal bliss.

The eaters of others were between meals
and their meals existed as the animals
they were. All living, all at once. From the earliest
phases of abiogenesis, there was no evolution,

just mutual timeless “come as you are” existence.
Whether in jungles or forests or oceans or rivers 
or roof eaves or carpets or stormy skies or clear skies, whether at night or midday in hot deserts or ice ages.

All of it co-existing. So many languages overtalking it made for a beautiful and insistent hum that was 	        so beyond 
the senses you’d reach for it — an architecture of 	        “living matter” 
harmonising in the moment without ‘moral censure’.

All in that living moment somewhere on its own 	        timeline. 
So many timelines paused and not a trace of 		        “survival of the fittest”. 
And what was bizarre — really the only bizarre aspect — 
was the secret manuscript by Ted Hughes

in which there was no tooth and claw, 
no bloody realism of nature, but magnificent equity.
Even entropy and putrefaction were on hiatus
other than when they were part of the glorious

existence of themselves. Things were gratuitously lush! 
It burgeoned with hyperbole but without a glimpse of bathos. A maggot smiled, but what it had been 	        consuming 
was alive and well and autonomously eternal. I leapt

through the paradoxes. Hopped from oxymoron 
to tautology, from superfluity to incongruity!
It all made perfect sense. They made perfect sense, And I was enmeshed in it. Now, I might have dreamt

this all up (as the trope goes), but when I woke
a camel walked through the eye of a needle,
and blue-banded bees flew from the florets
that had been my eyes. From my ears

swam dolphins and pythons,
my nose harboured bats and stick insects,
and from the vegetalia of my lips
spilled blank taxonomies.