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Mateuš Conrad Aug 2018
.pre-scriptum alternatives... either a bus-driver... or a garbage-man... ha ha... Leibniz... was a *******... librarian!

a zookeeper,
   a warden in a prison...
or some obscure,
   accolade role
   in an asylum...

i'm being pushed the role
of a chemistry teacher...

mind you... i know that the best
way to pet cats,
is to "ignore" them,
let them play their
solipsistic hide & seek game
with plain view of the target...

but i'm thinking of 3 dream jobs...
horticulture isn't an option...

must be the sort of man
with a floral pattern
rather than a sky-scraper
in my underwear
to provide gender
exclusive role play...

  whatever the hell the means...
but teaching children
chemistry?
   d'ah ****?!
    i want to be on the forefront...

a gorilla zookeeper,
a prison warden,
      an accolade
for what's the upper tier
of nursing,
namely, inside an asylum...
    
    but i won't ever get a chance
to prospect myself for such roles...
hence the poetry...
      
      given that i'm a chronic drunk
in England, but a sober
sparrow in Poland...

         come to think of it...
i'm ever only drunk,
when i start talking...
            alone, drinking?
        i can catch a judge
play-thing sober...
                
                  but those are my dream
jobs...
                and in all three instances...
none, are advertised for
potential applicants...

        like a safe pass into a business of
past, trans-generational funeral homes...
   just like they said:
it's not what you know,
      it's who you know -

unless of course there's a merger,
and you're thinking
about emperor Nero stabbing
himself in the neck...
    
     within the confines of a self
acknowledgment, "question".
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
Let out my ego and sense of order this comes from beyond this comes from the me between me if I listen I may hear it speaking, it's sleeping but talking and rocking, not still, and perhaps it awakens, perhaps it will open its eye but we mustn't depend on the idea that once he has opened his eye the whole dream of the world will just fade like my dream tomorrow morning which I already know I'll forget, like specific angles and perspectives of specific places in space and time that have slipped away but once in a while break through to consciousness
Like the sliding breakaway walls of Timber Drive elementary school
Or the rippling pond into which I fell and the old smile and laugh of my flesh and blood rescued me and held my body afloat in the air for a moment; and once I was the proud owner of a wind powered hovercraft, another invention spilling out onto the table of attention like the actual pig intestines the popular girl's parents used in her science fair project, the one that dragged on until the last monkey refusing to be locked up with the windows 98s in the archaic computer lab was tranquilized and convulsed on the gym/cafeteria floor in front of the PTA, who'd peed blood all down the front of their sweatpants; he was firing wildly hoping to commit suicide by zookeeper
Not knowing that humanitarian laws would prevent him from achieving his bliss, for the monkey knew as the Gnostics did that to bring a child into this black iron prison is a sin.
Did the Jonestown Kool-aid free them from the prison? Do they now walk among gods within the kingdom of the heavenly spirit? None shall know until the 13 crystal skulls are re-assembled and total gnosis emanates to the people in globe-spanning shockwaves.
JB Claywell Oct 2017
We walked the Topeka zoo
yesterday and looked at
all the animals being held
against their will.

The angry zookeeper
told us about the bear
that got its head stuck
in a peanut-butter jar.

“It’s not a laughing matter.”,
he said.

The children laughed anyway.

“This bear would’ve died,”,
he said. “if we wouldn’t have
come along and taken him out
of the wild, removing the
peanut-butter jar, and nursing
him back from starvation.”

The bear was asleep in a thin tree
above our heads.
He’d climbed up there to be closer
to the warm sun,
my youngest son advised.

I wondered if he hadn’t climbed
up into that tree to sleep farther
away from the din of his jailer’s
voice as he shouted to the herds of us
who’d paid our six bucks to stand in
the cold and listen to his angry
voice tell us about peanut-butter jars
removed from the heads of bears and
how that’s what it takes to save lives
around here.

No one asked the zookeeper
or the bear if either one
of them still liked peanut
butter eaten straight from
the jar.

No one asked if either one
of them ever missed their
mothers.

We just watched the bear
sleep in the crook of the
highest branch of that
thin, leafless tree.

His head lulled into the
crook of his elbow and his
*** dangled in the chilly
air.

I suppose he was dreaming
of escape.
Maybe he pondered, dreamily,
what that zookeeper tasted like.

Perhaps he dreamed of peanut-butter
eaten straight from the jar,
knowing his head wouldn’t get stuck
anymore.

But, I bet he was dreaming
of his mother.


*

-JBClaywell

© P&ZPublications
A Bukowski-esque story poem about a trip to the zoo with my family. (I have mixed feelings about zoos.)
D S Caillte Jan 2011
I remember well my first day of preschool
When the teacher taught us the Golden Rule
And how we were all God’s little caterpillars.

I remember the love I bore my stuffed horse
And how tightly I hugged my stuffed dog with great force;
I would be the world’s best zookeeper.

I remember my parents’ copious gifts of books,
How they were more important than my friends’ good looks;
Their stories still represent my dear childhood.

I remember the first time I discovered music of my own
Through a 90s band CD I had as a loan.
I danced with my headphones like a dryad.

I know the exact date I noticed at last
How much of my life friends had seemingly surpassed
And I vowed that I could never again be happy.

The stories were never again a fully open door,
More like a ditch dug out in the floor
Behind which I could hide my face forever.

One day, songs became a desperate race
To see who could sing and play bass,
So I’ve dropped out like a sixteen-year-old kid.

Now, lying under the stars thinking of this and that
I actually cower from the once-beloved animals like cats
Because they have uncomfortable interest in worms.

I was better off a caterpillar.
Mateuš Conrad Sep 2017
the jungian concept of the collective unconscious
is quiet simply bogus... why?
it would mean that no one in the rest of us
would or wouldn't know whether they were
capable of being... plumber!
        i find the jungian version of "events"
as scary as communism,
          it just means: a retardation of
darwinism - it means a loss of consciousness -
you do know, that jung is a covert
communist, right?
                 i find it strange that a collectivist
unconsciousness does not allow me to
engage with whoever i like in the dream world...
why is it, that i can't dream up:
  anyone i like?
    why am i not a magician in the medium,
pulling a black 12 incher from a top-hat
instead of a rabbit?! as usual: no answer.
      a ******* **** in the wind,
      a persian falafel in a turkish kebab,
a piece of broccoli in a cauliflower salad...
an eskimo in a sand dune,
about as weird as a zebra among pandas.
so we're collectively unconscious of
each of us are doing?!
           so the plumber doesn't know
why he's a plumber, nonetheless,
he's content with being human, and being part
of the great extract of the universe,
and the subsequent per se,
           and he's not ******* at anything
akin to the exceptionalism of an einstein?!
wow!
    what, an, exceptional, observation!
scary to endorse the psychiatric collectivism
of jung, and oppose the economic collectivism
of marx...
       in both instance: we're all apparently
going to succeed!
          but one thing is for sure:
we're not sleeping walking into one of them...
oh... right... we are...
    no wonder the circus is dead;
because when i think of a collective
unconscious i start thinking along the lines
of: there is someone, out there,
who's a walt disney,
    who doesn't actually think / imagine
himself as being a plumber...
         and then he does a las vegas on
the stage, and he gambles it right...
      which is why i can't actually understand
jung without understanding communism,
and why anyone would an essential part
of freud, to replace it with jungian
ideology, and not accept some minor form
of communism...
the collective unconscious...
   that's a truly unfathomable compound
of words these days...
     so we're all sleeping, or?
we're all awake?
         in the collective array of stratas i already
"knew" i was to be a plumber,
the poor ****** next to me,
already "knew" he was to be a politician?
oh, right, it was in the unconscious
medium, so we won't actually "know"...
   jung was a ******* communist however
you like it or not...
        and freud was just the instigator
of the *****-industry,
      a monolithic capitalist of the *******
agency of the base construct:
       skyscrapers are not, an, accident;
and i do abide by the law of necessary
correction,
   i probably have made a mistake -
   it, whatever ill i've said,
     nonetheless is wed to the already prefaced
intro to:
           i find the collective unconscious
a dire play on words,
   that shies away from the politico dynamic
of communism...
  by suggesting, that when all said and done:
the plumber has no knowledge of
being a plumber, rather "thinking" himself
                     being a zookeeper!
oh ****... i must be *******...
but i just watched the plumber do the zookeeper's
job, of teaching the gorilla sign language,
"telling" the gorilla: i, think, yer, deaf.
Daniello Mar 2012
We slump on the couch when we return like lifetimes
have passed before us.
We have to, even though it was only a seven minute walk
to the dining hall, because 1) the food was just
“weird consistency”
(which we tend to say regardless), 2) the light
in there yawned indifferently to us (when does it not?), and
3) the reassuring clink of our forks on our
plates wasn’t even there this time it was
hiding underneath slop
and smothered on top by the intruding sound waves
(who asked?)
of our next-table neighbors’ lives.

You made a sly remark about seconds to catch
a glimpse of youthful ****.
She’d gone to get some more baby carrots and cucumber slices
to put in her salad maybe
(who knows? who cares?)
Either way, her youthful **** would make the food taste like
something to you. And you
described them to us when you sat down again so
the slop would taste like something to us
(there’s pride in that type of generosity, don’t forget) and

(congratulations)

we had the faint impression of
some sort of
****** there, but

we didn’t tell you
(it’s easier that way).

A cup, a squeeze, a kiss on her ******* yes that could feed
our hunger for a night. And tonight was a night
like any, so her ******* led us to talk

of women, and women led us to talk of
love
(and the blooming one for the poor *******)
as we who lost withstood the vicarious twinge of
an addling ****** very different from
the first.

This one led us to pine for sweets, but the ones we found
were dry, so we left the table, left the dining hall, looking around at
the others: the lonely, the couples, the blessed
lonely couples, and the fortunate friends
huddled against everything with open laughter, enjoying
the weird consistency like drunk theoretical physicists before
they discovered bubbles and inflated eternally meaning
when they safeguarded a
zoo with a pistol they didn’t know how to
use, in Soviet Russia.

(So you see?) We have to slump on the couch
when we return like lifetimes  
have passed before us.
No one even bothers to pick up a guitar, we leave all four of them
strewn on the floor like
dead wooden boxes because
Dylan or Young or Cash (or whoever)
is already in the living
room. Any
bubbling, inflating, theoretical physicist
(any drunk, pistol-packing zookeeper, for that matter) will
tell you that.

So we slump, comfortably uncomfortable,
(at least we’re trying!)
feeling their (our) strings plucking. No sounds, no voices.
Because we don’t need
to hear this that.
Not right
now. (Not right
now).
Tiger land we got the virus
You thought animals couldn’t get it
But a tiger got it and
He was from the Bronx zoo in New York
He got it from a zookeeper
Really that it is bad
That this tiger got the virus
We should watch out for his class
That this tiger could do more than
Bite if you annoy
To every girl and boy
He could give the virus to everybody around
And the tiger doesn’t have the knowledge to wash his hands
Like the humans do
But this tiger can spread the virus
To everybody here
If they touch body, nose and ear
Tigers can spread this virus
So how are we going to
Keep this tiger in isolation
He won’t perform on social media
Cause he is a cute tiger
And god knows if a tiger could get it
He could escape and do more than
Bite our *** to death
He could spread the virus for our deaths
I rhymed death with deaths
Who cares because a tiger has the virus
And hopefully they can keep this tiger
Safe and in quarantined forever and ever
Orange and black
Keep this tiger safe
Oh yeah
GaryFairy  Nov 2014
the zoo
GaryFairy Nov 2014
The monkey mocks
the lion rages
it doesn't matter, in separate cages
zookeeper smiles
at the war he wages
the seals perform on the stages

the hawk escapes
the bear wishes
the zookeeper collects his riches
the lion roars
the monkey flinches
the crowd watches from the benches

the elephant gets ignored
nobody wants to mess with the elephant
Mary-Eliz  Apr 2018
Occupations
Mary-Eliz Apr 2018
Postman
and poet?

love letters in mail

Accountant
and poet?

precision, detail

Archeologist
and poet?

sifting for feelings

Electrician
and poet?

a jolt
leaving one reeling

architect
and poet?

drafting with words

Zookeeper
and poet?

singing of birds

Bus driver
and poet?

observing life's roadways

Minister
and poet?

perhaps how he prays

Lawyer
and poet?

though about win or lose
her poetry just might amuse

Economist
and poet?

Aren't we all that?
though we wear different hats
distilling things downwards
saving on words

whoever you are
whatever you choose
listen, observe
welcome your Muse!
A rewrite to add one. :-)
Sharina Saad Jun 2013
A careless  zookeeper lost the key to a cage
A  lion sneaked out ,
said good bye to its cubical home

Curiosity was the urgency to  flee
Surveying a potential new residence
Perhaps seeking new environment...
Lion was excited to discover
The excitement of the world outside  his  zoo...
He ran and ran as he had his golden chance
Soon he'd  find out the reality of life
in the human zoo...
Will he be Spending the nights
reminiscing the place and his people
those he had left behind. ... ?
Lover of Words Dec 2012
She was a girl with soft lips and a hard heart. One you kinda veered off from when you're next to at the mall. She was lovely specimen of perfume and paint which soaked her veins and made me enamored with her sweet perfection. And before I knew it, I was a victim of love itself. Love, one of innocence falls solemnly to its unknown vices, unaware of the pain and terrible heartache one can be trapped after loving someone. I loved her without hesitation. I loved her without holding a single song back. I loved her, with the knowledge that she may never see me throw cupid's spell that little naked babe cast on me. She was a mystery. One who kept to herself as if she had been a victim of pain brought on by the horrible tragedies that love can create. Maybe that's why I was so in love. She was a caged tiger, still incredibly beautiful yet dangerous to the touch. Only distance would protect me, but I was like a zookeeper. And distance was not an option. I could no longer look from afar. I was done with just looking. To feel her brown gold locks against my skin would be as if I'm lying china silk. To have those diamond eyes look at me with kindness and affection would be staring at the face of a cherubim. A ****** from sins of this world who would be the very one to restore my soul. I was enchanted, infected, and very much obsessed for this girl was…unfathomable and one I could only write about, so I did.

— The End —