Animal rescue

it started with crooked cucumbers, yellow cauliflowers – misfits, like you and me, later a seagull fell from the sky in the grey office park, the underdeveloped wings reflected brilliantly and a thousand times on TV, a man called his lover his project, I looked around and counted: one shelter cat without teeth, one kitten without social skills, a bedraggled parakeet, a frayed dwarf parrot, a lost squirrel, and recently: the broken butterfly that I dared not kill my Google search terms that day: ‘do butterfly wings grow back?’, ‘do butterflies eat bananas?’, ‘repair butterfly wings with bird feathers’ and finally: ‘butterfly euthanasia’ for some animals, there are no rain-soaked posters in plastic sheet protectors on lampposts, no hastily scrawled notices in supermarkets, no phone number tear-offs, no hands that accost you you say I should help myself before helping others – I think of how I once wanted to be saved and now: a Messiah complex I say: ‘I just love things that are a little broken’ and you say: ‘that's why you love me’