Sheets and Sacks

when a large dog becomes lost under a bed sheet
he turns into a dumb, rambunctious
watermelon
and thrashes his head around
like a fat, mechanical bull.

he makes clumsy attempts to
escape his costume,
his confusion,
his fabric burial.

and he always stays in one place.

and dammit, you can't help but think
that throughout his epileptic efforts to find that pinhole of light,
he's kind of having fun,
excited and laughing,
even in the grips of total blindness.

now, when a cat gets its head stuck in
the bands of a plastic sack,
the opposite occurs.

upon the first scraunch,
he PANICS
and turns into a schizophrenic, over-cranked
dumpster cheetah.
he tears across the house like a
movie star rape victim, spastic and desperate,
he runs into chairs and knocks over a lamp.
he gets stuck in the curtains and tears them off the rod,
then shoots behind the shelf and unplugs the television.

when his nightmare is over,
he emerges, calm and contained, like a seasoned politician,
acting as if nothing of great significance ever occurred,
and advertising his phlegmatic image with a confident gait.

and it is in this response where these two creatures
draw their similarities.

both animals emerge from their cages seemingly
unaffected by their previous turmoil,
unable to apply meaning to their quandaries
they simply go about their day,
happy and content,
as if the whole stupid thing was
just
a part
of the
program.