SEVENTY

 

I begin a seventh decade

With a will willed

And many plans made.

On a planet where many never get so far

I’ve never owned a TV or a car,

But I’ve still consumed a glutton’s share

And most of the time

Just sat on chairs.

So I leave to science one fat cadaver

With its arthritic joints

And clogged up veins

Let my body be a lesson

To those who’ve outlasted

As they cut the guts

Out of this fat bastard

But there’s a spirit

Buried somewhere in the adipose tissue

That might roll on the wheel again

So let a red kite snatch

One small scrap of me in its claws

And carry it up

Towards the sun.

Greater Spotted Woodpeckers

 

Since my planet is burning,

I decide that I need to attract

Greater Spotted Woodpeckers

To my suburban garden.

I open a box of suet balls,

And it’s as if every suet ball stares up at me,

From many approximately circular fat white bodies.

Black seeds embedded in the suet

Appear to be eyes.

The suet balls look up and say nothing.

They have all embodied

An idea, that I, and thousands of others, 

Have used to categorise other people.

The suet balls gaze up and I see that

They are the proletariat, the infidels

Or middle England, or the saved.

An undifferentiated mass

They are not individuals

But an agglomeration,a collective or  a class

An idea in any theoretician’s mind.

They could be conscious,

But I’m not sure

And unless some magic Marxist spark ignites them

They will remain suet balls in themselves

Not suet balls for themselves

And hang together in wire cages

To be pecked to pieces by

Greater Spotted Woodpeckers.

 

Walk out to the bins

 I carefully carry them down the stairs,

The containers that contain the empty containers;

That might still hold some residue or DNA

Or be marked by smudged handprints.

I open the front door

Walk out to the bins

And put the containers inside.

I am as careful as a prince’s butler,

Or as his majesty’s personal protection officer

To ensure that no fragment slips out.

I wish to maintain the proprieties of this suburban street.

Also, I oppose climate change

And know that landfill can be dug up again

But once something is made into something else

There’s no going back.

Any evidence of any alleged wrongdoing, which never took place,

Is now a traffic cone.