Plague: an alternative Armageddon

The thread of mortality plays us
puppets in this Punch and Judy farce
just as hazard reels us in and out,
hooked on an elastic rubber line
cast by a lunatic fisherman
thigh-booted and drizzling
a last cigarette and sucking
incongruously on a final straw.

Plague is in the air and mosquitoes
bite. A skylark coughs and crashes
from the heavens like the meteor
that killed the dinosaurs.

Dust blinds and blots out the sun
to glutinous blood. A new ice-age
spreads tentacles we chip at
with blunt axes, inject with syringefuls
of toxic gas, and shoot
with nuclear slings and arrows.

The kids (silver-spooned with iPads
or swollen-skeletoned with skinny limbs)
will strut the ruined amphitheatres
declaiming poetry and rap
through shrivelled and new-cancered lips.

Kleptomaniacs will loot libraries
like lemmings
and turn unlettered arsonists
in their illuminated Kristallnacht.

Lulled to peaceful impotence, the world
will (thumb in mouth) shyly hide in shadow
just as the swill of music disintegrates
to lurid rubber skeletons of balloons
at children’s birthday parties.

The maggot laid in unpredicted cyclones
will murder with unthought impartiality
both penthouse-flat and slum –
the drowning of the one buoyed up
on rafts of gold, and of the other
clasped to social welfare cheques.
Gulls will choke on corpses while hyenas jig.