"The Black Jaguar"

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A blackness darker than a moonless night
places a shroud around this primal cat
sharpened claws now retracted
showing she's not a threat
enticing potential prey
to come closer...
Unto death's
dreadful
door.
....
..
.

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* * *
*

Crouched within the dawn's mist-covered foliage
of this slowly awakening jungle sounding off alarms.
She waits, cautiously watching an unexpected stranger
boldly approaching her safely concealed position,
her sanctuary from those who might do her harm,
her utopia she has created for her pleasure alone.
He walks by confident in his indomitably coy composure.
Yet, an acute awareness about him she deftly detects,
as if he knows each and every sound of the forbidden forest
and every dismal secret silence of which it proudly protects.

She knows she could pounce upon him in an instant,
seizing his throat by the jugular, tearing into his primary vein,
within clenched jaws he'd be unable to pry apart as she made
her skillful lacerations upon his delicate flesh with her ripping
claws, cleaving away a mortality now in imminent judgement...

And yet, still, there is something about this human creature
that passes before her, not like the others she's seen.
No, they were reeking with nervous apprehension and fear,
knowing they didn't belong here, in her world, her country and
home... This one walks through her garden as if he's expected,
been invited, and been given permission to lay his hands upon
her things she's known all her life, her treasures.

So peculiar and unsettling in a wonderfully strange exotic way...
A part of her feels like she's eager to have, and wants to feel his
hands slowly moving down her sleek neck, with his deft fingers
softly, yet firmly grasping the contours of her lithe body as he
gracefully continues on past her spry shoulders, smoothly
advancing along the curve of her tense muscular cords,
gripping a tightened torso up to an arching back...

A feeling so intrusive, so primal and wildly tantalizing..

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*

No desire to reveal her presence from a poorly placed step,
she remains motionless, subdued and frozen in time within
the confines of her utopian sanctuary of solitude she's kept.

Watching this enigmatic creature as he casually saunters away,
out of her peering sight, his every movement delphic in nature.
She tries to make an understanding of that strange, uncanny,
puzzling and mystifying sensation she had perceived with a
wondering sense of native familiarity. Such a basic simplicity
was his energy and aura, screaming overtones of an airy fear,
impressionable within the circumference of his atmosphere.

She actually felt her skin tingling with a creeping outrage of
commotion, an uproar akin to lightning striking a nearby tree,
delivering waves of charged tendrils searching for anything
inside of it's grasping territory, it's wanting hunger needing
to be sated, no longer deprived of a dispossessed isolation.

*
* * *
*

Unable to remain where she is, her need to know what this
human is doing in her world takes a demanding call, an urgent
obligation and necessity that requires her attention to shift.
Not so much as a want, but more of a requirement, loyalty,
and obedience to her inner spirit, a fidelity not to be dismissed.

With the softly dampened ground as her cloak, she cautiously
advances through a masking of veiled vegetation, the forest
her curtain of camouflage. The shadows bestow an overlay
shielding her every movement as a shawl of invisibility.

With the dawn now beginning to take its full breath, gleaming
through cracks within the jungle's shroud, shimmering light
descends everywhere her field of vision takes her, another
exhibition always marveled upon by contracting irises at play,
an unfailingly eternal metamorphosis from night to day, a time
of rest and sleep, her time to hunt, capture and eat...

Penetrating through the final few steps of flora, with very little
greenery left to mask her gait, she commences to the place
where the rain falls together in a deluge of persistent noise, a
never-ending gush crashing upon the earth in a thunderous
roar, the place where the morning dew never retreats from
the new day, that fearful pool which every animal avoids.

*
* * *
*

A sudden and piercing cry unexpectedly travails throughout
the valley, a dark falcon's wailing-moan for it's lost chick.
The black jaguar doesn't like the foreboding nature of this
herald in flight, this harbinger of death. A forewarning to all
that can hear, a portent for the days menacing fate, an omen
forecasting something of change, a time of transformation,
something soon to be drastically rearranged..

Out from under the cascading rain which falls together, the
human swaggers towards the middle of the pool, his rags
previously worn now absent, discarded, and lying draped
upon a jagged rock near the water's edge. A fine specimen
of his race, she must acknowledge. She's seen taller, truth
be told. Although, his mass and width is something to behold.

Thick muscular lower limbs rising into what can resemble
a healthy branch from a sturdy oak tree she might consider
sleeping upon during a hot and humid day. His waist, akin to
a chiseled washboard of rock and stone, with arms streaked
of protruding veins coursing blood freely throughout his body.
Indeed, she's not seen a finer specimen of this race before.
The rags worn earlier were loose, hiding much and more.

She thinks back now when she was considering her leap
to take his life from this land, and how she might have made
a terrible mistake, a horrible miscalculation...
Should this man seize her neck, wrapping his powerful hands
around her throat, at best she might be able to scratch a few
marks upon his arms, perhaps landing a few good cuts to his
midsection with her hind legs flailing in a futile desperation.

With sunlight now covering half the waterhole's churning water,
almost touching this human standing within it's center, timidly
she stalks just a little closer, easing herself behind a massive
boulder about thirty feet away. She can feel a small vibration
tingling under her nimble toes, an almost imperceptible steady
humming throughout her body. This is why all animals of the
forest do not come here, for this place is forlorn, it is known.

The full light of the sun's rays now encompass this creature
standing docile inside the bluish-green water, his head tilted
up towards the face of the new day. The black jaguar begins
to notice the mist surrounding this entire basin, her sparkling
emerald eyes begin to slowly contract, focusing intently upon
the floating droplets before her, she marvels at the colors.

They're like little tiny rainbows held suspended in mid air,
a spectrum of shades uncountable, more color than that of
a true quarter-moon after a summer's shower... Scores upon
scores in sight, as if they were engaged in a never-ending
dance of power, like stars sparring on the naughtiest night.

Without knowing, as she was focusing her attentions upon
the misty kaleidoscope of mesmerizing colors, spellbound
within that tranced haze, succumbed and captured by a
reverie of suspended animation, she now looks directly into
the eyes of this human, still standing at the water's center,
though not as before, no longer gazing into the sun, now
he faces the place of her daydream, with a shocking guise,
staring directly through her stunned,
and blazing emerald eyes!

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( contemplating final segment... )

Completing this prologue