POEM WRITTEN AFTER THINKING A LITTLE


Those pigs were kind of interesting
but they haven’t actually travelled much,
have they? I mean, not in

the tourism sense. Making bacon isn’t exactly travel,
and you can’t go around the world
just in your head although experience may be gained

in all kinds of different ways although I still think
futility is futility no matter the guise. And
in our heads all the latest twitter

is about love and its attendant prejudices,
its laughable ambitions,
but before too many words are uttered never to take wing

a good long fast exhausting walk is recommended,
and a deep breath taken before plunging into the abyss
where mistakes lurk waiting to be forged

from the raw materials of
stupidity and potential. I mean,
or what I mean to say is

we don’t really have anything against anyone
or anything, but at the same time
we don’t actually like anyone

or anything either, although on reflection
mirrors contain people
we quite admire on occasion but not always, being

subject to mood swings like ordinary folk. The weeks
come and go and the visits to the abattoir
and the landfill retain their funny side

but somehow we can’t help feeling a little jaded, and
even the chicken factory seems to have
lost its allure of late. As for

tomorrow’s excursion the outlook’s predictably bleak:
I can’t look at scaffolding without thinking of
someone I’ve tried to forget out of the past

and the way they used to
irritate my head off