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 
Moo and Thrall
You Have Nothing to Fear
