Scare Goat

Welcome! Cryptozoology 101.

I'm (um...) Professor Frontalot! And you've come

to talk about the Loch Ness Monster.

Everybody wants to, but its study belongs to

the humblest catalogs of unknown truth.

You can order on the internet its front left tooth.

You could read my dissertation, "On A Fin With A Hoof,"

then you know we don't discuss it if there's already proof.

Come on. Put away the gray textbook

with its Yeti, Yeren, Almas and Bigfoot.

All this input you should have got in your pre-reqs.

Scholarly pretext? Check it for defects.

Better we devote our time as a class

to discovering the meaning of the creature at last.

To the monster! Is it real? I don't know.

It's a Tennessee stiff-legged fainting goat.

Must be the stuff of folklore and magic:

a creature so impossibly tragic.

I believe a pig can take wing,

but a Scare Goat is such an impossible thing.

What's the deterrent? Your mythology's current.

Some've seen it up close, and those videos weren't

abhorrent forgeries either, at all.

But a Scare Goat, I must insist, is forestalled

by any measure of your commonest sense,

and I wouldn't think that I would even have to dispense

this info: that this thing is just made up.

"Scare Goat:" something somebody pulled out of his butt.

What? No, wait a minute, we all agree

that the Skunk Ape and the Jersey Devil run free.

Don't try to test me in the Monterey Bay;

Bobo's so real he's become a cliché.

Got a Mongolian Death Worm at my house,

right next to Squonk and the Aqueous Mouse,

Chupacabras that pounce, though they'd never,

they can't, on seizurey midgets that aren't extant.

I'm the cryptozookeeper, true believer,

unicorn-chasing centaur seeker.

I'll accept what I cannot see,

but the fainting goat is too much for me.

I'm the myth truster when facts are lackluster.

but myotonia congenita is too much, sir.

I'll accept what I cannot see,

but not the fainting G O A T.

Go back in time, find Scully and Mulder.

Don't ask, just grab their zoology folder,

then bring it back to me now, if I'm still around;

I might be mingling with mole people underground

or up in the sky on a hippogryph,

flying through this abyss (it's in my syllabus).

I am instilling this knowledge in noggins:

imaginary animals come gumming and clogging

your mental acuity like the web of Anansi.

Now and in perpetuity cogitate fancily.

Figure this thing out, then sort it and keep it.

It'll be on the final like Bo Peep on sheep dip

(which she would have been on, if she'd been real -

she lived up in the meadow, wasn't that genteel).

I feel, in addition, since her tale's untrue,

girl must have been attendant to the Scare Goat too.