I'm an environmentalist,
I
like to see nature triumph
but not underneath my fridge.
I'm a vegan,
I don't like to hurt animals
except animals that try to eat my vegan food.
A cockroach is not an individual,
it's a message saying:
your life has failed,
you live in infested squalor,
in a humid slum, a burnt-out derry,
it's come to this: the insect house,
your dreams have led you only to
Roach Motel
the roaches check in but they never check out
and all your
exes will weep for what you have become because
a cockroach is not an
individual,
it's the vanguard of an invading army from No. 32.
A routine patrol in the bathroom cupboard
engaged six
unlawful combatants at twenty-two hundred hours,
chemical weapons were
deployed,
there were no survivors
but still they come.
My transformation is more Heinlein than Kafka,
I am like
the Starship Troopers who cannot fight the swarm
without developing a
carapace and a totalitarian hive mind,
we become the very arthropods
that we oppose
so I have enlisted the help of a superpower whose chemical
weapons
are immeasurably superior to my own –
I have formed a Human League with
Haringey Council
against the appalling efficiency of those antennae;
against
the unnerving precision of the placing of their feet;
against the loathsome
alertness of their posture,
the back sloping upwards, head high
like a gundog sniffing the wetland
prospect;
against the prudent skitter and the cautious re-emergence
from the skirting
as perhaps their apparent intelligence
emerges from the unswerving application
of simple rules –
Eat, Walk, Flee the bathroom light,
Hold still when shadows are moving.
Just as the random drift of molecules is enough
to allow
a poison gas to fill a room,
so a four-rule algorithm is enough
to allow a simple lucifuge to defeat
all the enlightenment of consciousness.
They are the shit-nibbling enemies
of thought
whose implacable mindlessness is more terrifying
than any plan.
In the coal forests they were fierce, the size of cats,
but their lungless bodies were slow to take in oxygen.
Giant dragonflies
clattered through the air like brass toys
but our ancestors had the gift
of sudden movement,
the amphibious splash into the swamp,
the sinuous dart of backbone while
stupid lobster
was still struggling to turn round.
So we were better at being our size
but down there
on the centimetre level
there are microclimates beneath the bathmat
where the Palaeozoic never
ended.
They can slide through holes so small
that the world
is transparent, porous.
They no more notice the legal boundaries of my
tenancy
than a migrating swallow notices
the expansion of the EU.
They are gathering beside the boiler.
They have discovered
the hole in the grouting around the outflow.
They have reconnoitred the
crumbs in the grill pan.
They know when I sleep and when I go out.
There is someone else here.
This is an old enmity.
We are not alone.
© 2005
|