Country Folks and Cockroaches

Down an Oklahoma backroad
Lifeless forms hang,
Slung over barbed wire fences
Like pagan witches,
heretic believers,
and thieving pirates.
These are condemned coyotes,
Whose decaying corpses repulse even the buzzards
And whose rotting flesh fills the air with
Sacrificial odor
So that coyotes with living breath
Still following their noses
Are presented with a question:
To be or not to be.

Down a metropolitan blacktop,
I struggle to survive
Haunting the city streets like a ghost
A tormented soul rooted up from wilderness
A victim of the latest Great Depression.
Looking out over a steely concrete landscape
With hungry, insatiable eyes
I resist domestication
And being herded like a cow
Onto the corporate conveyor belt of nonbeing.
This cow and the coyotes will survive
Unless Hank got the song wrong
And the lyrics should have been
Cockroaches will survive.