It has been there for days, wasting away.
Bugs are summoned by the smell of decay.
Furry growth in a moist state,
Flies regurgitate.
Buzz, buzz, buzz all over the Charolais.

The ranch-bound bovines, in dehydration,
yet wary of Kool-aid, declined to drink.
They grazed in wonder, cowed rumination:
where does “beef” come from?  A herd tends to think

of pasturage, water, and basic needs.
Ranch-hands assured them all was in order;
privileged guests enjoy the finest  feeds.
Cows, content on this side of the border

try Buddhism, yoga – or simply gaze…
though things in the distance loomed ominous
(those lots at the edge of the well-hoofed ways)
– and a stench wafted into their consciousness.

Yet calves frolicked on while the bulls mounted heifers –
dreamed vegan dreams as they nibbled grasses
some earned doctorates, others went clubbing;
all loosed sustainable methane gases.

Soothing their calves with fables and stories
where cows are the measure of pastured life
they deflected the gist of the young ones’ queries,
affirming that Truth means avoidance of strife.

“It’s best to just graze. Don’t ask questions dear.
We’re on this planet without any clue.
We evolved. From just what is a little unclear –
but Cow Science has proved that it’s true.”

— for the American Mustang



Strung up on one leg, bled dry while alive,
unloaded off trailers crammed full
of the crippled and blind —mares
giving birth on three legs, foals trampled
by stallions, and a wave of fear
hovering over tossing manes
like the sea after Moby **** surfaced
for the first time. Last year,

135,000 horses died —

rounded up in hundreds and sent
off to slaughter like feeder goldfish,
three stops from Canada
or Cabo, displaced from plains
once revered for their livelihood.

In 1969, Vonnegut
wrote, “And so it goes…”

In 2061, our children will ask about the wild
horses who used to live in their backyards
as they catch the last fireflies and bottle
them up in jars, flickering and dying
like tired bulbs giving up on electricity —

2015 sees Henderson, Nevada grasses paying tribute
to power-plant-lines and a suburb built
on Tralfamadore fiction: house-mounds
and picket fences caging domesticated dogs,
curb-lined streets and caution signs, billboard
warnings of humanity’s fixation with progression,
combined like coffee with an overabundance
of half-and-half and too much sugar — only 99 cents
at Dunkin down a little ways, and home
to the dreamers who forget the word freedom.

Within this abattoir we sat, sank,
dreamed, drank in what little sun we could.
Eight hours we had, eight hours a week,
when our weak, frail, tender bodies could sip,
would reach, and slip, on the ***** muddy mounds we made,
to raise ourselves above the common stage.

To see it lift its head each day,
that lone rose on the hill.
we look to where the breeze escapes,
there the rose its pedals drapes.
Through the bars our cell it scrapes,
its roots, the ground to till...

For years we sought we saw,
we reach, we grasp, we claw
The delicate rose at least to hold,
our hope for beauty in this hole.
The only beauty sitting bold,
in front of this mob of beasts.

At last he grasped and pulled it close,
(that fiend, we curse his name),
he tore it from its home, its post,
to have the beauty he killed the rose,
the one and only hope disposed,
and now no hope we claim.