On broken wings, on broken fingers
The victims of humans’ worst atrocity
These token things, slowly linger
Justified by no sane philosophy
Confinement’s cruel conditions are torture
This is a perfectly clear indictment
They’re tortured — less than a paper of space for
These helpless beings’ cruel confinement
These debeaked creatures shrieked
Diseased, from antibiotics they need constant treating
Meek, their bones slowly creaked
All so their corpses can be eaten
Were they allowed to stretch, allowed to turn
If millions didn’t each year burn
To death in a raging fire
Profits would not have been higher
So because market demands
Meat at a low price
They’re tortured, left unable to stand
Across their neck, a sharp blade sliced
When asked to justify this horror
“They don’t understand morality,” we stand proclaiming
As we needlessly pay for the worst torture
For helpless beings, horrific maiming
If we can torture amoral beings
Then would this not justify
Torturing the torturers of these helpless things
As we’re indifferent to their cries
If you could glimpse the sights
If you could smell the feces covering them
No longer would you write
That vegans are wrong to oppose that which is smothering them
If you could hear the screams
Each time on their corpse you decide to dine
You’d face reluctancy
Knowing your meal burned alive
In agony and fear
Its vocal chords stretched
Infected sores were clear
Before the horror of its death
If you could watch it’s fearful eyes
Each time it saw a man
No longer would you think one wise
When they proclaim we can
Eat them, for they wouldn’t have existed
If we hadn’t turned them into Jerky
Covered in sores and shit and piss
Their creation is no mercy
If you could watch them struggle, unable to properly walk
No longer would you proclaim, this is the natural state of their lot
If you experienced a single day, a single hour as these creatures
You’d immediately begin to demand
That we make them no longer covered in feces
Like cursed souls, in hell damned
Some say it’s god and lack of souls
That sanctions this cruel treatment
But could one whose love is whole
With factory farms be in agreement
When billions of innocents cry
Can our reaction be quite deadpan
When alive so many millions fry
And billions of baby chickens are quickly blended
Surely empathy requires
That we put ourselves
In the place of those whose skin is ripped off by pliers
And lobsters boiling alive covered in shells
Their eyes stabbed out
Their limbs decay
Loudly they cry out
From veal crates
Their teeth cut off
Their tail removed
No more will this lot
Happily move
On these poor twisted, mutilated creatures
More suffering is inflicted
Than all previous horrors, of which we were
As a species convicted
As mothers are separated from their offspring
No more are cries of joy
They sullenly sulk occasionally tossing
Calves cry out when they’re just a boy
If the places in which we slaughtered them
Were visible and transparent
Then quickly we’d abolish hen
And other creatures impairment
For once one glimpses their gaunt eyes, their dejected look
No longer can we excuse the use of their flesh to cook
No longer can we justify the horrors that we put them in
When a lifetime of confinement is the price for us to have cooked them in
A meal, so fleeting, so brief, barely enjoyable
Their flesh in our food ought not be deployable
Their frail bones creak — we know this
So many have osteoporosis
Yet we ignore this sickening fact
That chickens are glistening black
With shit and piss in a glistening stack
Their muscles twitch and sickly crack
We ignore the piglets, dejectedly they’re slumped
At least of the ones that survive, and are not as a baby thumped
What is thumping, you may ask?
Very few know.
That routinely they’re beaten against concrete, their skulls crack
Blood runs from their head, and red it glows
To death the pigs we pound
We leave them unable to turn around
To feel the sun on their face
Except immediately before they’re razed
Before these beings died
They sometimes have the chance and are amazed
To take a trip outside
A brief break from their malaise
This horror, this torture, it truly must end
The cruel confinement of untold hens
And pigs, and cows
And fish and sows
This industry must be broken down
For cruelty on this unimaginable scale
Mustn’t eternally prevail
If there is a god above
He will have to beg the animals forgiveness
If he is a god of love
For the free will that he decides to give us
Stunningly beautiful and heartbreaking ! Deserves publishing for everyone to read and pass on .
Thank you for this powerful compassionate heart for the animals .