Trained Chicken Poem by Patti Masterman

I sit surrounded by the carnage of the day’s efforts:
Words dismembered, metaphors bled dry.
I flap my wings in discomfiture at each glaring new
Example of mechanical fallowness;
Words hung out on clotheslines of manipulated
Speech patterns, wherever they could squeeze in-
Between the wet, moldy socks and twisted, bedraggled underwear.
I am a trained chicken at best, trying to force something out
At least partly digestible. As I peck out the sterile notes
One by one, on my red toy piano,
An automaton digs thru my internal filebanks, the flux of
Catapulted words continually bouncing over the chickenwire;
Escaping to flap heavily upward towards the trees:
And there to look down beady-eyed at the
Flopping, feathery decapitated blight.
For good reason, I hail from a long line of extinct dinosaurs.
Clucking with irritation, I see someone else has
Already laid all the good eggs, the golden eggs;
I can only scratch out some maggots and hope they hatch.