The alpaca named Dean gave my daughter a rash.
                The frizzled chickens peck away at the toenails
                Of a young woman from St. Louis as she splatters
                Some feed about hoping to attract the biggest cock.
                Caging these beasts seems appropriate, their spectacled
                Ideas of ducks a big part of their departmentalization.
                They graze in the fields scarfing up their discovery
                Of a new way to insert flora into a thimble, gobbling
                Up their latest inventory of syntactical mash.
                Slightly paranoid, the alpaca whispers his latest uncertainty
                And no matter how he spits I will not disabuse him of it.
                A plastic fork becomes chewing gum. A mirror
                Makes the chickens feel haunted. Walt Disney assures
                Me that my children will remember the names of
                Shakespeare’s characters. Wittgenstein is not poetry.
                Seventeen angstroms is a distance crossed quickly
                But is interminable. Three brothers from San Ramon
                Place their mother’s newborn in a washing machine
                At the Laundromat. Outside, a beggar begs for 50 cents.
                The libretto we recall is a St. Louis sandwich shaped
                Like the gateway to the west. The alpaca is well paid
                And is grateful to lick the salty shavings from my hand.


Copyright © David Koehn, 2005. All Rights Reserved.