RUMPLESTILTSKIN

Everyday he'd turn up
and sweep
the turnings on the factory
floor to piles
and no-one new his name.

They'd call him Jud,
or little Jud.
They thought he were Jud's
son, but he weren't.
He didn't even know a Jud.

One day, he comes in
all quiet
and gets about his sweeping.
The missus no-one knew he had
had lost the bairn.

Afterwards they called him nowt.
Cut a wide berth
round the machines to avoid
conversation.
Nothing awkward like. Just work.

At the Christmas do he didn't show.
Sent a photograph
two days later from Magaluf
and a bottle of champagne,
offering his resignation.

A bottle of champagne
for thirteen men?
We barely got a thimble each
the spawny get.
Jud. Ungrateful sod.

CHOOKS REVISITED

but he had never expected to live to see 

one hog dressed by several hundred men.

It was like a wonderful poem to him 

and he took it all in guilelessly. — Upton Sinclair

I was immune to the smells. The flesh that came

to me down the line, hand over fist under cleaver,

grew less tender to touch. The meat, hard

in my palms, was difficult to love. I broke bones

down the backs of beasts like breadsticks, snapped

chook necks with my brothers like sharing wives.

We do all that here, under one roof, with knives.

I stopped feeling guilty, was no longer disgusted

by the cannibalised corpses we swapped. The chooks

stripped clean to the bone, minced or diced,

thinning down to the end of their lives 

like the cigars we smoked. We were a machine making death.

I worked overtime, eyes down on the belts, obsessing

over skins, removing the sinews that cooked tough. 

With each chook, I performed automatic routines 

with my fingers and never came up for breath.

CHOOK

The slaughterhouse set my head pounding:

all those chooks jostling along the disassembly lines.

All the men there who shake hands with corpses.

All the codeine lighting. All the flesh.

I'd never though flesh was grotesque 'til I went there,

'til I saw what men do to chooks with knives.

Yet there was something arousing about it -

The chook chook of the machines? The conveyor belt?

Perhaps. I'd rather it was the men, elbow deep

in chook meat, groping wet innards,

packaging them. The fact they do all that here

under one roof. None go home. None have wives.

I think I began to like the smell of men and meat;

the mechanical nature of work and lines.

I began to want to be a chook, paralysed by light,

manhandled on the belts - torn - reformed - repackaged all night.