In The Making

Where colossal squid should be sluiced by the

gastric juice of this sperm whale’s gigantic gut,

they now arrive like specimens for viewing

behind clear sheets of digested greenhouse plastic,

the unassembled discards from some industrial

shore our physeter macrocephalus and link to a

prehistoric past should have glided by with its

enormous gob restrained and firmly shut.

The cachalot now dead, Jonah might have survived

in comfort had he too been consumed and fallen on

its internal fully sprung mattress, but flung from it

lands on another damaged shore with polymer

pots, ice cream tubs, hosepipes - not quite ambergris

in the making - just human crap and cheap vomit.

[The news story behind the poem, here]