Moo and Thrall

Some people like to be

spectacularly swayed.

By a red field

and a glint of metal.

A surgeon’s knife. A gun. A pole

that holds up a banner . . .

I want to tell you about what I saw,

on the quad.

Just-dead flesh-babies twelve feet high.

Monkey-head strapped in a test contraption,

            the enormous caption:

IF THIS IS ANIMAL CRUELTY THEN

            —WHAT IS THIS—

Late term.

They looked like smashed melons. One still latched

to the cord—

You ask what I thought. I thought,

Who am I to judge

what another person needs.

Who am I to have to pay

attention—

I’d wanted coffee and walked into

a carnival of death.

But death was always

ho-humming it, in various forms,

all over the dooméd land—

Still, students clustered.

Young men offered to play the ballast

for the scaffolding

from which the lurid pictures flared. I thought,

Look at that: something labeled

‘free speech board’—

At either end of the kill-display, where you could

            dig a marker

into white butcher paper—Get Your Fucking Hands

            Off My Body—in girlish

curlicue.

Across the quad the clinicians waited.

Across the quad sat the rational young, offering info

            on colored paper, it

couldn’t compete

with lunchtime Grand Guignol—

I wanted some coffee.

I wanted some coffee and a sweet croissant.

I wanted and walked

            through the moo and thrall, how hadn’t I

seen it—chalked

            underfoot, every few paces the same

smeared message:

            YOU

            ARE

LOVED