I brought home an axolotl
In a thin-necked ketchup bottle
Then I could never get the damned thing out.
I broke up with the mute Egyptian
Found his code was a crude encryption
Read the story of the life of a silent lout.
Waddlin' toddlin' down the track
End of the line and halfway back
Marry or bury me, I don't care
Fiddlin' a middlin' Irish aire.
Caribou smoked on a barbecue grill
Fed everyone from the curlicue mill
Then got stuck going home on the roundabout.
Frog and Toad were on the road
When they met a Chinaman
He said, 'Harro. How do-you-do?
I nevel see two flogs rike you.'
I'm a frog, you're a frog,
Everyone's a frog-frog,
On a log, in the bog,
Hiding from the dog-dog.
When life is losing its meaning,
And the glorious colors grow pale,
And death seems the one destination,
Remember the humble toad,
Doomed to spend drier days
Digging deep in the arid ground,
Seeking survival and shelter,
But to be loving and birthing,
It later returns to the flow
Of a resilient milieu that bestows
The clarity of radiant expanse
And the nudges of buoyant kin.
Perhaps the insular, dreary days
Are partly an illusion
And existence points not to the grave,
But to a metamorphosis,
In which we shed these calloused feet
And bathe in the nurturing nexus
Of our birth-home, the sea.
Wash Those Froggies, Wash Those Froggies,
Dirty Froggies Get Eaten By Moggies.
Don't Be Mean, Get Them Clean
While You Read Your Magazine.
Ten tiny pollywogs
Happy as can be
Along came an alligator
Ate up three.
Seven skittish pollywogs
Beneath a lily pad
Up swam a rainbow trout
They all died sad.
How much lower could I go?
How much more could I take?
Hadn't I had my fill,
my share
more than my share?
And you held my head underneath
the water in the wooden trough
you, gestapo god
and by christ
you did not let me
come up for air.
You willed me to be a new thing
an aquatic creature
gilled and with a cold cold heart
through which beat the freon
that was the inguement of your
universe.
You left me for dead in the trough
this new terrible thing
neither human nor emboweled
with a soul of its own.
You didn't have the decency
to leave me in a goodly sized pool
in which I could stretch my fins '˜n
flippers and relax a moment
and glom sleek-bottomed
tadpoles metamorphosing
into another kind of life --
Amphibian....
We're just another
fire alarm for you, ain't we
tripping off warnings of the coming
apocalypse --
I hear many bells and alarums
all over the world --
you took my sight,
and my speech
but you left me hearing
goddamnit
and a watery
life in death
set to a soundtrack
filled with music that's
little better than buzz saw
noise
from a new
generation
I can understand
only too well -
The Damned.
Amphibians.
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