#tralfamadore
I was a sweet kid, kind and calm
We lived down by the power plants
I did not have so many friends
Daddy ran some business on Mars
I had my own rocket in the garage
When I was lonely I counted the stars
*I got along
Only sometimes
It felt a little wrong*
Her sweetest smile would never fade
She was never late
She cooked so well but she never ate
She looked kind and nice
Yet there was no love in her eyes
Her iron heart was cold as ice
*I got along
Only sometimes
It felt a little wrong*
Ten years later then
I met this girl on Tralfamadore 10
Golden hair and silver skin
I asked her out for dinner, she agreed
We took the Klingon place on 11th street
She drank a lot but she did not eat
*We got along
Only somehow
It felt a little wrong*
Dec 8, 2015
Dec 8, 2015 at 10:50 AM UTC
— 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.
Apr 27, 2015
Apr 27, 2015 at 4:05 PM UTC