SUPER ZOO DAY!
zoo!
pre-zoo!
zoo!
apres-zoo!

I was very confused by this cage until I realised it was a joke! Sometimes I don't get jokes for a long time. Jokes are like... jumping beans. You've got them in your hands, but they keep jumping out, and you're on your hands and knees pawing at the ground, laughing at the jokes as an interim measure until you see them and work out whether they're funny or not.

You know that moment, when you're standing on your own in your house, and a simple moment of clumsiness (dropping some yoghurt onto my knee is my favourite) serves as a focus for all your unhappiness, and you're just screaming at a little lump of yoghurt, which is stupid really.

Sometimes it gets so bad. Metaphorical clumsiness with symbolic beans damages my mental defences, leading me to shout real words at innocent yoghurt. But the tears are real, and the fingernail holes in my forearms still hurt in the morning.


Hiding, rummaging, trumping, grasping, or on a secret mission?
I don't know - do you?

I don't remember what I was doing here. I have thought of five possible explanations.

  • I was hiding from my handbag because a clasp had pinched my finger and I was momentarily convinced that it contained monsters.
  • I had seen someone throw away something adorable and was trying to get it out without touching a wet newspaper.
  • I was nervous about a trump I wanted to do, and was adopting the safest possible position without taking off my dress.
  • I had become unstable after running around like an aeroplane, had been forced to drop my cargo (the handbag) and perform an emergency hug on a dustbin.
  • I was moving stealthily like my hero, Solid Snake. I was on a pretend mission to stop the man on the end of the bench from seeing me. When he did see me, I had to shout "EVASION MODE!!!", kick him, and run away.


Elephants, by Ezra Pound
I am an elephant, I have more mammaly knees than anyone else,
I don't know what to do with them, as jumping has proved unfeasible,
Thanks to my enormous weight.
Why did nature give me knees at all, if not to mock me?
Perhaps it was simply to aid walking,
For which I use them on a quotidien basis,
Quotidien is daily in French, and also means "pedestrian" when you're not using pedestrian to mean "person walking near or on a road".
I picked that up in Morocco, from a philanthropist who gave rugs to monks.

I soon perked up a bit, though, after a big tub of ice cream! In fact, I had so much energy I ran all the way around the zoo, and accidentally left it, because I was running so fast. The woman wouldn't let me in again without paying (even though I showed her the tattoo of a swan on my arse for identification purposes). I just squealed, ran in and hid in the elephant enclosure until they lost interest in me.

The one thing they didn't tell me was that the elephants were supposed to be mating. I've never seen an elephant willy before! It moved around like it was clever! It looked at me. I waved at it.

It waved back.

I left the elephant coop in a good mood. My mind was generally on the elephant willies, and this made me smile.

Until I saw a big ball of metal dung being stolen by some robot beetles! I had to wrestle the ball free from their grasp, which required me to disassociate my mental and physical faculties. It is what maniacs use when they throw water fountains out of the window. I found out I could do it when a teacher called me silly.

The Robots just stood there, perhaps pondering the logic of my actions.

At the end of my day at the zoo, I sat down at thought about everything that I had learned. I looked around for a zookeeper, but because I was laughing and spitting so much I couldn't talk (I was very excited), no-one could answer me. I got so angry and excited that I wrote a quick poem.

And I stuck it on the translucent mole cage and ran and ran.