The Cow Without a Smile
The Turkey Hill Experience, Columbia, Pennsylvania, USA. Visited on December 29, 2018.
Here is a manufactured innocence that I see quite clearly, but have failed to reliniquish completely. Growing up, we would say that our veins and arteries carried iced tea. We joked the convenience stores were blood banks. We transfused ourselves after a three-mile run. We transplanted our broken adolescent hearts with ice cream scoops.
What kind of COW
… he said …
what kind of COW
is too unhappy to smile?
We never challenged why every history began coincidentally with our own. We sensed but rarely questioned why the story appeared cut off. We didn’t push because the ones on whom we depended pushed back. They never once hesitated.
But a lie is the gap in a toothy grin;
Truth is the tooth that never fills in.
When words supplanted sugar as my escapement, I became a poet, a poet asking, asking with moral and aesthetic obligations. I think, to the extent I’m capable, that means turning away from that which appears directly in front of me.
I look forward to becoming a bird, a turkey maybe, unburdened by property. Until then, regular is my favorite tea; my favorite ice cream, black raspberry.