Our life revolves on the backs of bovines—
cut up in patties or linked into sausages,
tripe, tongue, chuck steak, prime rib, or roast beef,
it’s a glorious bovine bonanza, America
our moos of complacency
sing out along roadside Arby’s and Mickey-D’s down through Dixie and up to
the blank, staring herds of Jersey where
beef flavoring pumps out of chemical factories
squeezing an ounce of diabetes into a pound of grade D beef
straight to the diseased heart of middle America
til’ your arteries look like your philly cheese steak
while nipple guzzlers spew hormones out obese and dimpled
thirteen year-old breasts
on reality tv shows of bovine sorrow
give me your patties, your sirloins, your prime rib
yearning to breathe A-1 and ice cream
and I will shelter them in the cellulite folds of my shepherdless flock
while amorphous seething mounds of half-digested cud
are sprinkled conservatively over a GMO bread basket
in a full-on down home beef chompin’ rodeo
a heart-attack hell of a time
yep, a greasy napkin is all we’ll leave
when we’re gone
as our fat melts back into glorious free phospholipids
to fertilize a new pre-historic fern revolution.