the anticharismatic 2

 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.

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.

 

 

©PR Murry

VORTEX

Hypnotised, watching the water swirl.

A lovely vortex forms above a plughole,

Bits of detritus begin to rotate,

Fragments of things that didn’t get ate.

There’s a currant in the current,

Along with other clutter washed off plates.

Trapped and twirled by gravity

Into a deep dark cavity,

Into the black hole beneath the kitchen sink;

Spun round, sucked down, gone in a blink;

Down through the pies and drains

And it’s never coming back again.

Or is it?

I have a suspicious misunderstanding

Of all this physics.

The planet I live on is rotating in space;

For all I know, it’s changing its place;

It might be one fragment in a massive whirlpool,

Irresistibly pulled into a cosmic plughole.

 

 

 

 

MY NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

 Once I could walk to Darwin’s cathedral,

Which was not my father’s house,

But was nearby.

My aunt aught me to pray

After my mother died,

Which was some solace

Or comfort then.

Yet my wishes, whatever they were,

Remained ungranted.

Ancient words learned by rote,

And misunderstood,

Did not fill any void;

But inside Darwin’s cathedral

I could sometimes walk alone

Along the echoing galleries,

Where the skeletons were displayed.

So, similarities were shown to me

I could see that a fin or

A flipper, a wing or a hand or claw

Were the same beneath skin,

Scales, feathers or fur.

Unlike the words of forgotten prayers,

That has stayed with me

All my life.

Sunlight Laundry

 Aged seventy-three,

I now can see

That the muse inspiring my poetry

Has always been laundry.

Ever since my first paid job

In a building named ‘Sunlight’

In Sands End

Beside the Thames

Where vans brought

Dirty sheets from Chelsea hotels

That I loaded

Into vast rotating iron cylinders

And unloaded the laundered result.

Unless the vast rotating iron cylinders

Went wrong and produced

A massive knot of wet linen,

That needed to be pried apart

With crowbars.

Ahh, those weren’t the days!

Now I just blunder around my bathroom,

Like a dalek without a death ray

Picking up little bits of laundry

With a plastic claw.