[Newspoetry] Look! Up in the sky...

[DL Emerick]

Look!  Up in the sky...

It's a bird!  It's a plane!  It's Superpig!

Yes.
A sight I'd never forget.
I never saw it before.
I never want to again.

The form was familiar.

I've pigs on animal farms.
I know how they like to rule.
I know how they like to eat, and drink and root.
They'll eat most anything:
Yes, I slopped the hogs --
Almost closing an ecology.

They wallow in mud baths,
Like people wallow in spas.

I've shoveled their shit, too --
Wet and runny and smelly,
Even with absorbent straw mixed in.

On cold winter days, I shoveled it.
The shit stack over the fence,
Keeping pigs out of their own shit.

I'd plunge your pitch fork in,
Twist the tines and break the stack's frozen glaze.
Down a few layers, the biomass steamed and stank,
The maggots wriggled and crawled.

I'd slide my shovel up,
Scooping the chunks into its pan,
And carefully slew the shovel round,
Throwing each chunk into the manure spreader.

Oh, inevitably, as frozen layers disappeared,
I'd be scooping the steaming stuff;
Some of it would slew off, on too quick a turn,
And anyone near me would be splattered.

Later, I'd tractor the spreader out to field,
Letting its conveyor-belt and rotating tines,
Driven by the turn of the spreader's wheels,
Chop up and flip shit-straw chunks out.
The faster I drove,
the higher and wider the spread.

At the end of job, I smelled foul,
My denim jacket spotted and splashed,
The cleats in my knee-high rubber boots clumpy,
With woven mats of shit and straw.

Months passed, payback time came;
Slaughter day comes for all pigs --
The lucky ones we shot and slaughtered,
Carving their porky bodies into meat --
Hams and bacons, roasts and rumps and chops.

The unlucky ones we took to market.
All those little pigs who went to market,
Stayed their and soon died there,
Slaughtered like Jews as Treblinka,
Shot in the head and throat ripped,
Sold out like the upstart Joseph.

Oh, look!  Up in the sky...
If pigs could fly, they would --
And shit on the rest of us --
An unclean animal --
Yes, unclean, is man and all that he touches,
Like Midas, he turns to golden shit what he touches --
We don't eat Man, unclean animal that he is,
But pigs, tasty and tasteless, would!

(I proffer my deep apologies --
This was to be a bitter poem
On Bush's pigs, his war criminal gang,
But reveries became anal-orgies.

Oh, look!  Up in the sky, a bomb is falling,
Some of his pigs must be flying by!
A sight I never wanted to see before I die.)