Dinosaur Town

We called it Dinosaur Town

--a cookie cutter, quintessential little borough

where anthropomorphized predator and prey lived in harmony.

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A family of Triceratops lived next to a bachelor and his kid brother Velociraptor.

The kids would play with the bachelor as the parents laughed at their antics,

unconcerned if he had ulterior motives; they would have held the stomachs at the thought.

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There were only happy endings

--peace with the occasional break of trouble,

easily resolved in episodic time, sometimes with the snap of the fingers.

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The dinosaur folk were naive, though, to the realities around them,

never had they heard any words ending with -ism,

never were they questioned and criminalized for truly innocent actions.

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They never had to second guess the ones around them, searching for ulteriority.

They weren't paranoid, looking over their shoulders unless they were playing a game.

They lived in near-perfect health and wouldn't know true fear even if it stared them in the face.

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But then again, the dinosaurs were puppets with children pulling their strings,

children who wore rose-colored glasses, innocent to the way the world worked.

We glamourized life, and the dinosaurs played to our perceptions.

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In time, the dinosaurs, including the Triceratops family and the Velociraptor brothers,

went away to be a part of another Dinosaur Town elsewhere.

A hundred different children, a hundred different versions.

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At times, I find myself ludicrously jealous of toy dinosaurs

or perhaps truly, the younger me full of romanticized notions.

Because the world doesn't work like Dinosaur Town did.

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