Saturday 18 April 2009

Day 17

Valley of the Clones

In the valley of the clones a sheep will steal your shawl
and wear it like a baby’s spit-splattered bib,
and leave you sheared and naked on the high street.

There are stalls that sell popular fiction rewritten
as an anecdote by the new author about the old book:
‘In Chapter One, Dan Brown opens the story thus...’

You may start to feel you don’t need your friends anymore
because all their beliefs are the same as yours.
Evolution eradicates the existence of scars.

In the valley of the clones ‘BAA!’ is a treasured aphorism
and there are too many versions of this poem to accurately count.
The second-person ‘you’ is in fact a synonym for ‘I’.

They changed the ‘ks’ to ‘Marx’, as in ‘Marx and Spencer’,
though according to the reigning government
the West always ‘Caps it off with a list.’

They changed ‘homogenous’ to ‘homogenius’. I’ve heard
the fields are now bereft of their white puffs of cloud.
I’m about to brave the walk and see for myself.

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