Author’s Preface
My name is Hoffman and I’m 93 years old and I’ve been called a commie faggot and a fascist playboy, and I’ve been called a lunatic and an idiot, and I’ve been called a prophet and a genius, and they’re all sort of right and they’re all sort of wrong, and by god, that’s the problem with talking these days, and I don’t doubt always has been. It makes you wonder what good words are if that’s the case, and you notice how some Christians use the Bible to preach loving your neighbor as yourself, and other Christians use the same Bible to justify exploiting everyone they can, or worse killing anyone they can’t, and Christians are just offshoots of the Jews, and some Muslims use the Koran the same way Christians use the Bible, so, yes, I begin to wonder about the value of words, but, no, I don’t deny the value of the thought and imagination that guides them, so there you go. Hoffman.
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The First Cowboy Speaks
Oh wonderful cow!
I chomp your flesh for sustenance,
and wrap myself in your durable hide
as though I were your viscera.
Your bones become my weaponry,
my tools and dinner dishes.
How kindly you supply my every need,
how bountiful is your generosity!
I think I will enslave you.
I’ll destroy your best and brightest
‘til you are so stupidly docile
that without me you would
stand in one spot until you died.
I will take milk from the cows
and castrate the bulls
and imprison the calves in closets.
Then, finally, I will eat you all.
Oh come, fine cow,
let me domesticate you
like a luckless wife or child.
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