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.