The anti-charismatic

Hello, I am a slug, and I’m crawling out tonight,

Leaving a trail of slime, because I’m going to unite

With the headlouse, the woodlouse, the weevil and the rat,

And also join up with several other species that

Are anti-charismatic, in the public eye,

But this is an injustice which we seek to rectify.

None of us look striking posing on mountainsides,

Migrating across savannahs, or singing in the sky,

We don’t dive or leap majestically out of the ocean

Fine artists don’t paint us to symbolise emotions,

Or patriotism, freedom and other noble notions.

We don’t roam in rainforests or on tundras,

We were stowaways on the ark

And where we live is called infested

Never made a national park

No one will cross the world to see us

But to hear a gorilla fart

They’ll fly all the way to Africa in a polluting jet plane

The gorilla farts, they gasp in glee

And then fly back again.

We won’t sell you anything

With cute faces or appealing eyes

The means of our own deaths are what we advertise

Since a picture of a cockroach sells tons of insecticide.

We are vermin, pests, pariahs, carrion eating parasites

 But when it all ends, we’ll cut you down to size,

Because the corpse of one lion will feed a thousand flies