The Sad Sad Cows
The Sad Sad Cows
by Shawn Misener
I’ve decided that the perfect post-apocalyptic food is cereal
slathered in creamy, slow-motion milk,
rice and sugars and grains
-shit you can package up and store forever
we’ll just make billions of pounds of it now,
before the bombs go off,
we will revitalize Michigan’s economy through the armpit
of Battle Creek, and then wallah!
we’ll all be survivors living off of Captain Crunch and Fruity Pebbles
while we salvage the shithole we made of earth
There will be a milk problem
but we’ll just move the cows underground
and bludgeon them with our mighty super-evolution hammers
until they become milk pumps with hearts
blobs of flesh and bristly hair that we’ll grow in chambers
the size of top-loading washing machines,
dubiously alive yet not much more than a vegetable-
a vegetable that produces magnificent amounts of dairy and meat
maybe not T-bones or flank steaks,
but at least all the gooey hamburger our underground civilization could ever need
—
Let me just say this:
I am going home to Battle Creek Michigan
where the ghetto smells like frosted flakes,
because that cereal smell is money in the radiation-proof bank
And just outside of the city limits await the cows,
dumb, docile, slow, ponderous, and indecisive
waiting to devolve at our fingertips.
oh, the sad sad cows
I enjoyed this one quite a bit, and think this is one of your best works so far. Ever read Peter Singer?
Thanks Joe! Nope, not familiar with Peter Singer.
He’s a philosopher, and is a pretty big name in ethics and the treatment of animals.
probably ’cause I’m not into ethics or animals, really. I did go as far as to look the guy up on Wikipedia. Nice pose.
You never disappoint, sir! Always very descript in your futuristic/industrial distopias, it’s a godsend (even though he may be dead) for your willfully imaginative and synthetic notions to take on redemptive savior form beaming into whatever fucked up situation we may have gotten ourselves into. It’s been a pleasure reading your material these many many years and i hope you keep cranking it out! “Slow-motion milk”–that’s stuck in my brain now! thx for sharing!
awww! “All these years” !!!