Animal Farm

Animal Farm

Animal Farm

Consider the toucan’s festive gold breast.
Its multicolored pecker, oddly cutesy 
& perhaps, a cartoon-comfort
to the gym-roped Westerners
reclining on a beach in Costa Rica.
It’s the same old song: good-natured
smile, hard work, a hat’s off kind
of attitude & before you can say
post-racial, you’re a Resort Toucan.
The benefits are room & board
but the cost is blood. Most times
it’s the closest ones – birds
of the same rainforest, same
quadrant, same tree – who give up
your whereabouts to the jaguar.
Quick as you got the gig, the boss
is tossing you out on your ass
all over some flipped umbrellas  
& a tourist’s scarfed thumb. So now
you’re roofless, alone, vulnerable
& the beast is licking his chops
in your mirrored aviators. Stifling
too is the Midwestern Subdivision
in its treatment of the black squirrel.   
Science tells us black squirrels
have driven out native grey squirrels
in numerous areas, but no bullshit
in my development, black squirrels
are relegated to lots with a view
of the highway. Mornings
they work shade for acorns
between homes narrow as Lincoln Logs.
History tells us black squirrels
can’t afford robust landscaping
but will pay their mortgage –
chair the neighborhood watch
if you like. Slenderizing, their night
of hair. They’re sun’s prey.
They avoid overexposure, make tanning
trend. Black squirrels
they fit in, get along. Know no one.
They see other black squirrels & run.