The Ones on Our Plates Part 2

Another poem

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