1/31/05

1.

Dorothy, lost as Ruth among the alien corn,
weeps beneath a sign that points to Oz or Kansas,
Toto in her arms. In this generic city background
of building blocks, every window-ledge is blank--except
that flower-pots sprout generic flowers without leaves.

2.

The lion metamorphosed into some gentle-giant biker,
a golden mop standing in for his lion’s mane.
His beer can crushed in one paw, he sports tattoos
on the uniformly golden skin of his human forearms.
Lions are nothing but miserable in their cages.
What leonine eye in a zoo is not rheumy?

3.

The gold that blows away
with stocks and bonds becomes the straw
that fills the scarecrow in the cornfield
who is the artist and whose name sprawls
across the brick road in the painting
scuffed with the feet of pilgrims.

Jokers in cornfields have hoisted
ski-masks on scarecrows in Freddy Kruger pranks.
Real guignol theater begins with the animals:
the Orinoco croc that chews on gator

down-scales to mites infesting honeybees to death.
Take the Serengetti then. Take real-time lions
who cannibalize their dead once downed
by gunshot wounds or greed that drives them into trees
to steal an eland a solitary leopard caught rightfully,
then fall to break their backs. All that effort.

Property-as-theft's the way of gods and wizards.
Get the blood and body of another, consume its virtue.
Across from the Oz sequence, a giant lobster
drops tinier humans in a roiling pot:
kill the meat yourself. Why not drag children
through abattoirs after the field-trip to the dairy?

4.

Lions kill, don’t eat hyena. Not a hyena in sight.
Scary shit-eaters to this day, the oldest creodont,
whose grin is our human smile's remotest ancestor,
their stomach acids eat through cartilage and watch-spring.
Their grin reminds, and flashes teeth back.
Try to find the stuffed hyaenid in Toys ‘R Us.

5.

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