Tag: birds

Vegan Matadors

Posted on by Andrew Mark Watkins

Seals coming ashore
Waves crashing around
Babes guided in
The shoreline brethren
breathe collectively and
rest their weary heads
make the sand their beds
for the night.
Alert to the slightest tremor
from the seas or the sky
or from land tractor
A bird perched upon a fence post
hops down to have a closer look
and sees warm breath mist from hot lungs
and hears sighs and moans grunts and more.
Placebo chipset wired in his brain hums and
uploads images and sound to a satellite receiver
which is then beamed across the globe
A seal rolls over onto its back and claps
sending echoes down the rocky beach
Excited the bird hops closer only to see
headlights approaching from the east.
Car doors slam the sound of rifles cocked
The moon shines on reflecting off seals eyes
as one by one they begin to die
The bird flies right into the firer going for his eye
but a bullet catches it in mid-flight and explodes
it in half sending circuits everywhere
It lands a smoking heap and manages to send off one last beep
to HQ where signals are boosted nationwide
and a swarm of vegan matadors takes to the sky with vengeance in mind
with cameras whirring ready to capture animal killers taken down
on their way home after a mindless killing spree.

I am not a vegan but then again birds are not matadors usually! I started with a title word and the rest wrote itself really. Reminds me a bit of that scene in Indiana Jones when Sean Connery runs into a flight of birds with his umbrella sending them into the path of an oncoming Messerschmidt which is trying to kill Indy and his Dad who then says ‘”I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne. ‘Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky’.” Beautiful.

The Boy Without Legs

Posted on by Andrew Mark Watkins

There was once a boy without legs

He went everywhere without them

He spoke to everybody he met

He pushed himself far on the track

And in schoolwork he did not lack

And he had lots of friends, he wasn’t missing those.

But when he sees someone run for a ball

Or walk with a loved one

In his stomach is a tight ball

That constricts and twists and hurts

And he watches the birds and knows

that where others go, man will follow.

So on he goes soldiering on without

the legs he lost when he was young

and into adventures on blades

Maybe, who knows.

There is a moral to this tale

one that’s hard to put into words

It’s more the feeling the little boy

without legs gets when watching the flight of birds.