This is a story about a dinosaur.

Everyone likes dinosaurs, right?

This dinosaur is green and friendly

and all-around happy.

He sings songs and tells jokes

and has sensiblyexciting adventures.

He smiles, he loves his dino-parents

and he sleeps sweetly

on a pillow of leaves,

with no worries to keep him up at night.

He plays in the dust of a billion years ago-

dust like pink sandy beaches on rocky shores.

He’s got a cute name, which is not important.

He’s got a best friend- different species but

they work through it and, naturally,

learn from it.

He avoids tar pits and volcanos and hail-storms.

This dinosaur is too fresh and rounded and innocent

to know ugly words

like predator, carnivore, food-chain.

The little dino-hero sees the beauty

of the prehistoric world,

before things were written down.

Before people started to erode his earth. 

He doesn’t know war, pain, hunger.

He loves the sun but doesn’t burn.

He loves the sea but cannot drown.

He loves the cool breeze on his pebbled skin

but has never known cold.

 Oh yes, there are things he will never feel-

Loneliness. Poverty. Hate. Anger.

Deep disappointment.Rejection. Blind prejudice.

He’s content being unaware of the things

that bring smarter dinosaurs down.

He doesn’t know what’s coming and no one

has the heart to tell him.

Meteor, mass destruction, species elimination.

Extinction of a whole, blissful, dreamed-up, secure world,

that existed for this one particularly true time.

Because all dinosaur stories are happy, right?