

The Paradise Ranch
They arrived like moonbeams
spilling picturesque, creepy magic over everything:
hedges, TV cables, packet mix soup and because
once they absorbed it looked just like the other crap we
inhale, gargle, slather and swallow everyday
nobody noticed
also because they’re smarter than us.
Nobody typed a letter to the government with their keyboard on CAPS lock
Air traffic control scratched their balls, yawned
poked mute antennae at weather balloons
Conspiracy theorists the world over dreamed simultaneously
that a muscled FBI agent with amazing tits was whispering in their ear
“Baby, you were right all along…two shooters, and Area 51?
It’s practically crawling with aliens in there. Just gets me so hot…”
Our bodies knew, and tried to warn us
but we hadn’t listened to those primitive conglomerations of
muscle and sinew strung over bone for decades
A tingling scalp, which clearly meant
“Far out! I’ve been invaded by a parasitic superior being!”
was mistaken for dandruff and doused in foam
Fingers danced at night like tarantulas
At precisely 3am a billion legs leapt in a massive spaghetti stutter of limbs
that required nothing more than
a powder at bedtime
one less espresso
a firmer mattress
a better quality of internet porn
The heart-breaking thing was the animals, who did their best, despite everything
They knew.
They bellowed in their feed-lots and screeched from their battery cages
The whales sung laments to the research boats
and all the elephants in Africa wept tears for the ivory hunters
The earth drew a huge carbon breath and sobbed pure oxygen for us
because it knew that when we marched ourselves like puppets
to the slaughterhouse –
dumb expendable creatures to the glittering, intelligent beings within-
that the Paradise Ranch wasn’t paradise
and the happy meals it dished up were cold
and just barely short of tragic