New Meat

I’m the guy

Who labors late into the night

To invent the “synthetic meat”

You know, the kind that grows on 

Petri dishes

 

Big Science, you see

Has this quest 

To replace the cow and pig

With cells that crawl around

Like grains of rice 

on agar

 

Given the proper stimulus

We'll herd them

Like pink worms

And train them to not fly apart

Nor invade your liver

Wash your hands please,

It smells "down there"

 

Reviews

[DIVYA]

Those grains growing on agar really have the potential to become invasive...If something goes wrong. One of my greatest nightmares is imagining if the Ebola Virus mutated becoming airborne from its present mode of infection through bodily fluids. This poem made me think of biological warfare gone out of control.

[Eilis]

I have a daughter who is obsessed with biology and has a collection of microscopic pets in jars. She has also cultivated her own bacteria on agar dishes. There is a fine line, I believe, between curiosity and exploitation. The closer you get to the ground the more you realize how much we are impacting with every footprint on the grass or pulling of a weed. Not to mention creating, selfishly, things that have no place in the natural order. Drs Jekyll and Frankenstein discovered a little too late. But we have trouble learning from others. Enjoyed your voice in this and your other poems.

[SkinlessFrank]

Thanks for this. It reminds me how I detest the self-importance of some of my colleagues. One has even devised a tool that if deployed in the wild could target whole species with extinction. Anger and nausea are all I feel when confronted with such smugness.

[Kenneth The Poet]

As Bill Hicks said, "we are a virus in footwear". This great piece exemplifies that truth sublimely.

[Beccy]

We reap what we sow I suppose and come the day, all that will be available on the supermarket shelves will be a selection of different coloured little pills.

Yummy!

Beccy.

[April Blue]

I enjoyed reading this.. I like the vocabulary use in this piece..

[roarke]

yep. A petri dish called earth.... humans for want of something better to do, like to believe they can create/control life.... ah well. Pass the mustard.