The Genius Of Being A Dumb Animal (Like A Horse For Instance) Poem by Ted Sheridan

The precocious interrupted patterns
of his thick tongued speech
are a direct result of the broken dialects

he had been learned at home.(the master not the horse)
His loving mother and laboring father,
both of whom were legal immigrants,

had walked out of eastern Europe,
and yet only briefly had stepped outside
of their existentialist dreams,

when they conceived the likes of him.
'Son, we want you to hurt like we do.'
they both would radically repeat

to their impressionable boy.....over and over,
as they washed behind his balls and ears.
And so it was that at a very young age

these austere expressions would become
very systematic in his writings.
Poetry became his enemy and his best friend.

Throwing himself into books full
of someone else's distorted
thoughts and equations,

he promised himself that one day soon
he would save the world. (from itself)
Even if it resisted such help, he thought

he would never see it his parent's way.
In a time when most boys
still played with all their marbles

he kept his glass eyes in a tin,
which also doubled as his head.
Thereby,

an early indicator
of the duplicitous manner,
in which he intended to prove

to the myopic world
that he was smarter than one might think
Hence.....*this is where the horse comes in...*

The man bought a horse to help
him in the cluttered junk business
he had built from the ground up

The horse just as all else in the man's life
was always placed before the cart
and the cart was routinely overfilled,

while still bridled to the hard working horse.
The horse, after all was said and done
remained completely convinced

despite his Master's verbose claims,
that there was no possible reason,
or need to reinvent a better wheel

for his overloaded cart
as was suggested by the horse
when the horse had on one day developed

a noticeable shortness in his gate
Alas.....poor......horse
All the genius which the horse displayed

in both compensating for his limp despite the load.....
still completing his daily grind without complaint
would prove to count for nothing

when he broke his leg tripping over his master
in the stampede to get the 'Hell out of Dodge'____
and his master's utopia......