Steemit Open Mic Week 80 - original song "At the Cryptozoo" with annotated lyrics.

This is a song about cryptids, creatures which are probably mythical but there's question about whether they really exist. In fact, after I wrote this song, one of them turned out to be real.

^{Oops, I said Week 79. This isn't a repeat from last week, I just screwed up the post timing.}

Lyrics:

I know a real good place to entertain your kid
It's not very far, but it's pretty well-hid
They've got aquatic rhinos and a flying squid¹
They call it the cryptozoo

We're going to the cryptozoo
We're gonna see Bigfoot² too
Gonna stand in his great big shoe³
At the cryptozoo

See the Jersey Devil⁴ in his cute little cap
He's got so many toys that button, zip, and snap⁵
But he only ever plays with the offside trap⁶
Down at the cryptozoo.

We're going to the cryptozoo
We're gonna see Nessie⁷ too
She lives in a giant slough⁸
At the cryptozoo

What's this exhibit with all the goats?
Kept far away by such great big moats?
Some of them are lyin' there with holes in their throats!⁹
Here at the cryptozoo.

We're going to the cryptozoo
We're gonna have lunch there too
I'll have the jackalope¹⁰ stew
At the cryptozoo

In the gift shop they've got Sasquatch¹¹ prints
Wendigo¹² dung and Batboy¹³-proof tents
I got a Thunderbird¹⁴ for only fifty-nine cents
Down at the cryptozoo

We're going to the cryptozoo
We're gonna see a bunyip¹⁵ too
Who knew that they were royal blue?
At the cryptozoo

We thought that we'd use the last of our time
To go see the Yeti¹⁶ and the mountains they climb
But someone had committed an abominable crime¹⁷
So they're not at the cryptozoo

When leaving the cryptozoo
Make sure that nothing follows you¹⁸
And you've cleaned off all the Mothman¹⁹ goo
From the cryptozoo

1. I chose aquatic rhinos and flying squid because they were some of the most boring, self-explanatory cryptids I could find, and they didn't deserve their own verse. Not too long after I wrote the song a team of Japanese researchers discovered that the flying squid was real.
2. A North American legend of a large, hairy, human-like creature.
3. The song is full of jokes about how a cryptid zoo would essentially behave like a regular zoo. Just as my zoo has interactive stations where kids can compare their wingspan to various birds, or their weight to black bears, the cryptozoo has a station where kids can stand in Bigfoot's shoe and see how huge his feet are.
4. A legendary goat-like creature with wings from New Jersey, USA.
5. Like a real zoo, the cryptozoo has an enrichment program, providing toys for the animals to interact with.
6. The National Hockey League's New Jersey Devils notoriously developed the dominant Offside Trap defensive system in the 1990s, leading to the current Dead Puck Era.
7. The Loch Ness Monster, a large aquatic beast rumored to live in a lake in Scotland. Of all cryptids, by far the biggest tourist draw.
8. Basically a comment on zoo exhibits being pale imitations of wild environments, this is the weakest joke in the song.
9. This verse is about the Chupacabra, literally "goat-sucker," a reptilian beast of Latin American myth. It's also a joke about how sometimes at the zoo you look as hard as you can but can't find the animal that's supposed to be inthe exhibit.
10. A legendary rabbit with horns invented by taxidermists in the American West.
11. Another name for Bigfoot.
12. A cannibal monster from the myths of the Algonquian people native to the Great Lakes Region in North America.
13. A half-human, half-bat character created by the American tabloid newspaper Weekly World News.
14. A powerful bird from the myths of many North American Native cultures. The name was also used for a fortified wine popular in the 1970s USA which famously cost fifty-nine cents, as memorialized in Townes van Zandt's Talking Thunderbird Blues.
15. A large carnivore from Australian Aboriginal mythology. Descriptions of the bunyip are extremely variable, but I think mine is the first one to include royal blue.
16. A large human-like creature rumored to exist in the Himalayan Mountains.
17. The Yeti is also known as the Abominable Snowman. I wrote this shortly after an appalling incident at my local zoo where patrons wrongly entering the meerkat exhibit ended with the meerkats killed and that exhibit permanently closed.
18. A good idea when leaving any wild animal facility.
19. A half-human, half-moth creature from the folklore of West Virginia, USA.