What's Your Favorite Animal?
Just keep posting things or be swallowed whole by the great What If
WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE ANIMAL?
Whats your favorite animal?
She asks all the kids.
Mines an otter! the little boy says.
An otter! Why, What a wonderful creature
An aquatic predator found in seas and rivers
Did you know the otter's related to badgers?
They have the thickest furs
To survive in cold waters
What a good choice!
I love me some otters.
The boy gleams and she smiles
happy to teach.
Cause when she went to college,
teaching was within reach.
She paid tens of thousands for her degree.
A BS diploma in Biology.
Now, she works at a gas station selling slurpees
to pay it all back -
the new American dream.
She just did what they told her
All the right things
Filled her head up with factoids
But the zoo ain’t hiring,
and Southern schools ain't science-ing.
So, she’s clocking in hourly
to peddle fill ups on 13.
She woulda been a veterinarian
if only grad school back then
was more affordable.
Well, anyways-
They say knowledge is power
But what you know doesn’t matter
It’s who you know that’ll
Pull you up rungs on the ladder.
If it’s even worthwhile
to be anything more than a gas station cashier
making kids smile.
With Slurpees and candy
and positive attention,
she lights them all up with one little question:
What is your favorite animal?
A simpler life, than a veterinarian,
No doubt. But it sure beats
Putting dogs down for a living.85 AND DASHING
Whatever he gave
Whatever he made
Whatever he’s survived
For eight point five
Decades,
Wasn’t enough
He’s still doing Door Dash
And not a spry 85
He's crook-backed and moving slow
Delivering fast food to lazy people
In a car that’s been paid off
Since before Pope John Paul
He drops the sack of grease
Rings the doorbell and leaves.
And he’s off
To the next drive-thru.
Until one day
They take his license
Then what?
Take care of yourself
To live forever
And you too can be
85 and Dashing.GRIDIRON
The play isn’t dead.
The play isn’t ever dead.
This is a live ball in your hands
and you gotta run.
It doesn’t matter that
your pads
are filled with helium
and the ground peels away as you run.
Or that you have a headache,
because CTE is a myth,
- like all the mental diseases -
and even if it wasn’t,
nobody has time for any of that
bullshit mental health mythology
because in reality,
there are 11 gorillas barreling your way,
all wearing brass knuckles
with steroids on their breath.
and meth in their veins.
And the ref is too distracted
fucking your girlfriend on
the other team’s bench
to blow the whistle
unless you
1) get the touchdown
or
2) you die.
Go!MARBLE EYES
Her lips plastered over,
she responds to “babe”
like a statue.
Nothing cracks her
heart of stone.
Something hot grows behind
cold, marble eyes.
Focused
on anything
but you.