Say Goodbye
It's like Frank said whenhe worked in the pound,
killed all those dogs
in the evacuator, sucked the life
out of them in the oxygen
deprivation chamber:
he took a lot of them home,
the cute ones, the ones he
couldn't bear to kill -
the ones he wanted to save,
and they ran out in the
traffic,
broke their chains and disappeared;
one got killed in a fight,
another ate rat poison.
One way or another they died,
every last damned
one of them.
One day someone came in with
5 perfect poodle puppies
and Frank was told
to kill 4 and save one. The choice of
who lived and who died was left
up to Frank,
so he took the runt of the litter,
the one who seemed he could
adapt
and he killed the 4 best ones,
reduced their air pressure
to that at 30,000 feet,
where they puked their hearts out
like all the others he
"put to sleep,"
and took the little one and put him
up front in a tiny cage,
where he would appear
pathetic to the general public,
some of whom selected him and
took him home that very day,
but who returned the next week
for another puppy, saying
the one they got
had "just died. He was fine and then
he died. The kids are all
broken up" they said.
And they wanted to know if there was
a money-back
guarantee.
You can't save anybody, Frank decided,
the system takes over
and that's that.
After a while Frank stopped
taking any of them home.
Frank modified
his objectives, but you can't say
he ever really gave up on them.
Like Frank said,
"I don't want to save them, not really,
I just want to rub their
fucking ears."
And he rubbed their ears, the furry discards,
the smart ones, the dumb ones,
the old and the young,
the rejects, the crippled and lame, the ones
with bad markings, the wrong coloration,
With problems beyond
their understanding. And each time before
he put them in the chamber, he looked
into their eyes.
And if there was no salvation, if there was
no redemption, at least there was
someone to say goodbye.
Michael McNeilley
© 1997
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