individual rights in the time of crisis

at the height of
the midatlantic drift,
the smiling mermen began pairing
off with one another most
charmingly,
and, attesting eagerly to their
masculine aquatic beauty,
gradually finding solace in
the soft fronds of kelp,
hundreds of yards long,
drifting like wedding gowns,
but even better.
**
when it began to rain
on the sexy lonely naked teenage boy,
he cussed everything he could
think of,
and the trees around him blushed,
and dropped all their leaves.
autumn had never in the history
of time been known to fall
this fast or
this hard.
**
while the mermen were fucking
each other with their mysteriously aligned
but highly functioning genitalia,
the sexy lonely naked teenage boy
began raking up all the fallen leaves,
and sweeping them out
to sea. it wasn't a pretty solution
to the problem, but sometimes elegance
is the first thing to go.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem also appears in my book String Bean, published by BareBackPress in 2018. The poem first appeared in Chiron Review, Issue #101, Fall 2015.)