Animals in Afternoon

My fennec fox friend told me,
off-resentment in her voice,
"Life sucks and then you die."
And my brother the fanged bear said,

"You don't know what
suffering is."

And the transparent and wide-eyed canine thing
--a girl who resides in a bright, false haze--
--skinny and odd, yet lingering, with head tilted--
told me it was all
"unnecessary."

My father, the starving and bald
eagle
scoffs, ruffles his feathers, and sits down,
sets down.
He squawks an idiots' squawk.

My mother,
the awkward Persian cat,
swishes her tail in a half-interest;
she licks her paw.
Meow, she meows
quite plainly, Meow.

A few parakeets tweet their pleasant tweet
for a pleasing moments' pleasure before they must go.
The sunlight sparkles on their wings, but then
the sun sets.

The smiling yet melancholy
adolescent tigeress'
eyes turn
to slits.

She still grins.

And my claws protrude from my hands
and retract,
my fickle ears shoot up, fold over, and disappear;
my tail snakes around my human thigh and flickers.

Blood pours from my mouth,
black blood.
And I wonder where
the innocence went; I wonder where
my memory has gone.
Where has childhood fled to?

And why have we all turned to animals?