A Slaughterhouse Escape Poem by Donal Mahoney

A tractor trailer with slats and moos
pulls up at a city slaughterhouse.
The driver pulls the wrong lever

and two thousand pounds
of trotting cattle go for an easy
ramble down the street.

Cop cars follow in no hurry.
Police don't have lassos and
wouldn't know how to use them.

The cattle stop for a snack in a park
where homeless men and women often
spend the day on benches talking

until the cops decide to round them up.
The homeless people eye the cattle
and the cattle munch and eye the homeless.

This is the last escape for the cattle
but homeless people never know if
tomorrow or the next day could be theirs.