‘To stiff a virus in mid song,’
clinicians say, ‘cannot be wrong.
So by extension it is we
whose work will set the planet free.’

‘No, by best logic it is us
(your ‘we’ is twee but who’s to fuss),’
say engineers, and build a road
as killing field for cat and toad.

‘We make the vehicles, their lamps,
refueling stops, and maintenance camps
so humans can ride roughshod through
the habitat of owl and shrew.’

‘With our aid fools can forests fell,
inverting lines that used to swell
with fair-caught trout. They are no more
now we’ve made nets and heavy bore.’

‘A piece of Heaven with a beach
was not beyond our tankers’ reach.
To those who washed the birds in answer
we sent a friendly warning: cancer.’

‘No, not warn thém. They all will die.
The warning’s for their friends who cry
and for their children left alone:
the world is ours hours to own.’

Clinicians treat the engineers
for nightmare, lower-colon fears,
and for their failing faith that they are right
to hide the stars with manmade light.

These same clinicians, when they quail
at questing for the Holy Grail
of killing other forms of life
go kick a cat or take a wife

or husband as their own advisors
and when that fails, hire advertisers
to put a better spin on things
and blow expensive smoke that rings

the bug-free swamps and empty fields
with figures of fantastic yields
of crops that look superbly neat
and that sport a shelf life you can’t eat.

The advertisers takes the wages
that they are paid to serve as sages
and buy furred robots, shiny cars
and sell us colonising Mars.