They Trusted Us
by Roderick Falconer


God gave them sad brown eyes,
And faces that were kind;
Kind of faces children love to find
At dawn on Christmas day,
Or look into for sympathy,
When hurting and alone;
Kind of eyes that follow us through life,
And heartbreak, love,
Forsaking never even when all else,
And all the others go away.

When unknown men came walking in,
They brimmed with happy expectations,
Wagging tails, their trusting faces, shining with anticipation, raised.
Without words - it was with souls - they understood,
We were their best friends,
And they were ours.
A double bond, in blood, in love:
Decreed by the creator before the dawning of dawns.
The truth, deep-written on their hearts and ours,
Like something scratched into the walls of prehistoric caves.

One day a man-shaped shadow fell over life,
While it was very fresh and new,
With yet so much unlived,
The young ones were taken, trustingly,
To a room of stainless steel and ultraviolet light.
The puppies licked the hands of those
Who lead them to the obscene edge of arch-betrayal,
Cooperating when injected, too;
A mere pinprick of pain.
And then the world of sensory excitement -
Anticipated joy - went dark,
As drug induced unconsciousness covered them like a shroud.

After that, things would never be the same.

They went trusting, into darkness,
And for just a little while,
A friendly dreamscape comprehended them.
Memory, and instinct, unleashed:
The who and what they would've known in this life on Earth...
Bright shining rivers; hills of green, jeweled with morning dew;
The birds and butterflies and creatures of all kind -
Rejoicing, every one - around the tree of life,
Their beings, amplified beyond our best imaginings.

And to the many-colored scent of life
Bright burning pixels of idolatry, reality,
Carried on currents of intoxicating air,
A remembered presence of their mothers, nuzzling them,
And then, a glimpse of us, as we were meant to be:
Their supernatural guardians, and trusted friends.

That was their final day of innocence,
Before they woke up to the murderous men in white,
With death's infectious bite-marks on their souls,
And antiseptic perfume like clouds of egg-filled flies.
That final sleep was peaceful, without fear,
No sense of what was happening to them in the white room,
Where their sleeping bodies lay.
The horror they would wake into,
Because evil men were selling lives
They hadn't made...
Selling beauty, life, and friendship,
To disfigurement and death.

In unconscious innocence, their necks were shaved,
Preparation for their voices to be surgically excised,
Cut out to insulate their ghoulish torturers
With manufactured quiet,
A counterfeited piece from ugly truth.

Their hound dog voices - barks -
Their howling into distances through woods and neighborhoods,
And deep into night's crystal-starry skies,
Were silenced now, forever.
But what need have they for voices, anyway;
For everything their voices might have meant,
No longer means a thing?

Though mutilated by their trusted friends,
They never could expect the terrors yet to come.
Lab techs didn't look them in the eye,
When they pilloried compliant puppies
To torture tables, set to ****,
Locking little heads inside plastic boxes,
For parasitic insects to eat them while they lived.

Strange arrays of imagery rampaged through their suffering minds,
As pain ran rabid and overtook them, there.
Locked down and unable to run away,
Or even by an act of will, to die.
Torment that they couldn't understand
Was on them like devouring fire.
And with their human friends so near,
And checking all the time,
Why did no one see, or hear,
and no one move to comfort them?
They trusted in us, all the way, it seems.

Howling in their minds was raw electric overload -
High voltage snakes of melted circuitry -
As hordes of hungry jaws gnawed and sawed,
And burrowed into them for many days...

Until at last, some inner life star got impaled.
Imploded, then exploded, and the lights went out.
And they were here, no more -
Just somewhere where there was no pain.

They trusted us;
God's viceroys to the dogs -
Our faithful-to-the-end companions
with a single deadly flaw:

They trusted us.