crying at the zoo

5/22/18 9:57PM

my worst nights are spent in a zoo!
monkey’s shoulder! bugs under feet! clay pigeons! the shots ring out, miss and the target still breaks!

enclosures! a fish tank of fog! speeding as best I can, on the only familiar roads! they are short, and my car tossed by lake breeze!

the songs I come back to are all vicious burgundy, without peat! they crack my teeth with regret, and drive me closer to jaundice!

the visitors are ever present! watching through glassy specs, fiery flares and abandon! the petting zoo is closed! the most punctilious are free here!

pay with limbs! dismember your heart first, and be rewarded with crocodiles! languish with reptiles, whose bite is stronger than their dead eyes!

don’t you yap at me, you horrid bloatflies! ticks without host! I set up this heartbreak, to ruin another early work day! why the almonds in shroud again?

why, indeed are there strays even here, where there are naught but families? the cosmos send them not to make me see, but to make me turn!

I am perpetually stuck peering down halls!
a tower! a basement! a cathedral of waste!
a swamp! a burning pyre! a junkyard of capitalism!
there is always a stare! especially in empty rooms!

inwardly I push and outwardly I wilt!

there are no gulls here!

and the bugs
they snide
and chatter

wretchedly dreary, is a zoo!