pursuing zoo

"get out of my water bottle,"
i tell a shark. he is just looking for a place
to take off the weight of searching.
i am too. i go to the zoo & talk to the animals.
one, a wild horse, is the last 
of a pack of horses the zoo once purchased
in the hopes of making them run back & forth.
i buy a hamster wheel & use it 
as a makeshift gut. follow my gut in circles.
my life has taught me, if nothing else,
i am not to be trusted. i once carved
a hole in the wall of my apartment
so i could have a direct line to the angels.
they clip birds wings for their own good.
or so i am told. a hawk without a wild
spends the day doing sudoku & dreaming
of pizza. i consider scaling the fence
of several enclosures. most of all
i think i would like to be an otter. i ask
for their relationship advice & they tell me
i should cut out my tongue & sell it
as a talisman.  this is not the worst suggestion
i have ever heard. the snakes had promised,
"you will lose your limbs one by one."
i look at my hand & find the head
of a zebra. i open my mouth & flamingos 
stand there pinkening. i make a telephone call
to an elephant. i say, "do you think i should?"
he says, "always." how does one acquire an instinct
once it is gone? once it is turned into 
jars of plum jam? i am sweet in the same way 
that microwave pancakes are. enough 
to earn my sugar. not enough to be a species.
i do not know if the zoo is a good place
or a bad one. binaries will always fail us. likewise
i don't know if i live in the zoo or in the wild
or if the wild is also a zoo. i've built
so many cages trying to be your afternoon
& your corndog. you grab me by the taxonomy.
tell me, "i want to see you without bones."