Take Your Conservative Values...With You

You can mount your fat and loud Harley while I slide on my sleekly whining rice burner

Go climb up in your 300 horsepower crossover while I slip into my hi-tech hybrid

Blare some Fox Republican Radio as I privately tune into NPR

Have yourself a double cheese burger and I’ll hit the Health Foods salad bar

Get into the institutional weekend football game as we watch MMA on weeknights

Fire up your brand new ATV and wail past our slow hiking into the wilderness

Turn up the satellite country music as we listen to new downloads in our earbuds

Suck down that read meat and potatoes while we prepare some spicy Thai food

Go chase some elk on your smoking snowmobiles as we listen for the cold silence

Pay lots to make your pickup a lot louder and roar on past me as I commute on my bicycle

Put your everlasting faith in the bible and I’ll support evolution until the evidence changes

Stand up against the environmental wackos while we quietly evolve our new lifestyle

Keep supporting unaffordable free-market medicine as we ask for universal healthcare

Just keep focusing only on the democrats as new, different parties emerge at last

Reiterate the importance of abortion and I’ll keep talking about climate change

Talk about the sanctity of marriage as I try and require an exam to have children

Knee-jerkingly approve defense increases as we join hands in search of peace

Adopt the arrogantly-smirking Texas lifestyle as we look to folks in Europe for consolation

Laugh about your extra pounds while joking sarcastically about us, as we are walking by

Put your money in clothes, cars and vacations and we’ll retire 15 years before you

Take your processed red meats and pass the un-drugged, free-range chicken, please

Dwell in the faux luxury of your McMansions as we downsize in comfort far away

Get hypnotized by corporate soundbites while we deep dive the details on the internet

Roar across the waters drunk and shouting hoarsely as we quietly paddle and just observe

Listen as your media leaders pigeonhole us and ignore our independent consensus

Worship your rigged free markets and leave us to fair trade sustainability

Point to your golf course ponds and fight our suit to halt your wetland progress

Have some super-sweetened cereal and take your laxative instead of eating real fiber, stupid

Kill a tree for Christmas and get our re-gifted items in your own recycled wrapping paper

Adjust your thermostats for comfort in the fight against our foolish global warming hoax

Have illegales manicure your artificial lawns and laugh at our pitiable xeriscape

Leave all your electronics on all the time as we compete to use the fewest watts

Make your living fast-talk-pimping real estate while leaving the engineering to us

Destroy their future to get rich quick as we scramble to sustain ourselves in your dirty wake

Send your many discards to the landfills where we foresee your children subsisting

Take your sad and comical, old-timey heaven and leave us the certainty of the eternal void

From The Shadows

I crept out at night from our hiding place and squeaked a bit when it was very still

The powerful lay in temperature-controlled leisure before the holy big screens

Their angry bellowing and trumpeting kept me fearful in my darkened hiding place

I scurried about gathering a few of their scraps for food and to build a tiny nest

Sometimes when they would see me they acted as if I were not there

Other times I saw my tiny brothers left limp and broken in the dank urban desolation

Their power was so vast and all-encompassing that they were as gods to us

The completeness of their dominance left them as doubtless as we were hopeless

I rejoiced when I could steal back home with one or another of their castoffs

I knew how to stay very still and remain concealed as they trampled heavily on by

We made no issues with the gutted landscape they had created in their images

We prospered as well upon their increased wastes, the richer they felt they grew

They totally ignored us but slaughtered many of us in simple unnoticed accidents

We stole their tiny golden eggs at every rare opportunity

We did not know they made noise just to interfere with each other’s thinking

Sometimes we furtively hung posters of our churlish, clandestine manifestos

I piped out my shrill rage with all my puny lungs in the safety of our filthy warren

Fought tiny but brutal battles over under-nourished, whining females

Did not make so much as a sound as their ponderous footsteps approached again

Saw others crushed beneath the massive metal monsters those gods rode within

Though our fate was sealed long before we were even born, we trilled our reservations

We worshiped them in fear, never harboring a thought of usurping their grandeur

While we left nothing lasting, the signs of their dominance remained for centuries

Though sad to say not a trace was left by the time the next geologic epoch had begun

I spent a lifetime wet and caked with putrid mud without any promise of salvation

We were glad to be overlooked when they cast about for yet another enemy

I made my living darting from cranny to shadow when they were not around

Little remains of our existence except the legends from that era so very long ago

When I died, but one of the pups that I had sired still lived to sniff my dirty corpse

They had overturned our hidden nest and casually slaughtered us as we scattered

I had been in mourning as my sweet dam had succumbed to a poisoned bait

They never knew we bore the insects that carried the virus that took them down