Love's Labor Lost

In a sun-splashed municipal Eden where topiary elephants lumber beneath candy-floss clouds, a khaki-clad pachyderm with a badge polished to lunar brilliance attempts, with trunk-curling awkwardness, to woo a blushing river-horse belle whose lashes drip with delta dreams. Their courtship, equal parts ballet and blunder, is ambushed by Ignatz, a spindle-limbed moral terrorist armed only with a smirk and a brickyard of nerve, whose audacity sends the law-stamped colossus trumpeting into the shrubbery. Humiliation ferments; the cop retires to a speakeasy of the mind, chugging Beevo—amber courage in a bottle—until his arteries pulse with jungle drums. Re-ascending the scene, he stomps the park into a dust storm, flattening Ignatz beneath the iron doctrine of civic order. Krazy, part seraph, part street-corner tragedian, discovers the prostrate prankster, croons a requiem so achingly pure that even the graffiti weep, only to have Ignatz resurrect mid-aria, hurling masonry at the moon like a libretto of defiance.