Fly

I lie on my back listening to the sound of a fly dying,
buzz buzz buzz
His little flailing legs put up a fight every so often.
He lies on his back too, staring at the same ceiling as me,
the same spinning fan.
He too contemplates the life ebbing from his body
but his end seems nearer and in fear
he struggles.
I think I have more time than him
but I may not.
I may be soon buzzing on my back
in terror
as my own darkness closes in on me.
For now, I abandon the thought
and sweep him away with the dust.

Bird

A tiny bird sits in your ringed hands,
Wringing hands
cease to be the still perch for the sparrow,
Grackle
growing black and large,
taking flight.
Empty hands close to hold each other.
The warmth quickly fades.
Unsure hands pick each others skin
in a secret ritual.
Slightly open mouth.
no sound.
Wide-eyed and embarrassed because
you would "caw caw"
call out
if no one else were there.
Instead, to bide time,
you twirl a stick in your fingers.

Ants

the ants travel up and down the tubes,
my veins,
careful footsteps through the platelet covered paths
from a moldy kidney,
useless filter,
to a perforated septum,
allow empty chambers to form a
collapsing organ of hysteria.
They travel there, too.
My wandering uterus is their playground.
Black clot lining sliding down as they climb
along the walls.
I birth their tiny forms
one-by-one
into the cold stagnant air.
They clamour to get inside me once more
to be warm and comforted,
although
I am cooling fast.
Nice
to be wanted once again.

Ahem.....

It's on like a prawn that yawns at dawn :)

Sad dream

I had a really upsetting dream last night. It took place in this weird abandoned street, where everyone lived on the fire-escapes of the buildings and it was always dark and cloudy. I had just gotten home, and Matt came out to tell me that Boots had kittens. He showed them to me and told me two of them had died. One looked just like a tiny baby Boots and her eyes were still quivering, but Matt said she had been a stillborn or "she was born asleep and never woke up." The other dead kitten looked really limp and doll-like (just like the real dead kitten i found in my yard) and this one looked like a little Blanche. Matt told me that she had fallen down the stairs. Then he told me there were three more kittens, but one of them had disappeared. The other two were striped, one grey and one orange. He told me they might not make it. I remember being really sad, especially for Boots, since they were her babies. Then the dream all of a sudden was at a beach in the evening, and me and Matt were walking down to the water. There was a sign that said "Shark day: please be careful of sharks, but don't worry, they are not deadly" or something like that. I was nervous about going into the water, so we stayed in the really shallow, ankle-deep tide. Then we were walking down the beach and I saw a big black thing. Matt thought it was a shark, but I didn't think so and approached it. It looked like a man-sized black sperm whale, and it was dying on the beach. I knew I had to help it, so i started rolling it back into the water, but I had to be careful because it was trying to bite me. When I got it in the water, it swam away, but then suddenly the water got really deep and me and Matt were treading water and there were shark-looking shadows swimming around out feet. Then I woke up.

What gives us the right?

Today I had to participate in my third vivisection. If I didn't help, my physiology teacher would fail me for the lab. There was no option not to, no matter how much you disagree morally with the experiment. The first vivisection was for a frog's femoral nerve. He was a big dark brown toad, and when he was brought to our lab table, the top of his head had been cut off with scissors. It was a grotesque sight, but with no eyes, it was a little more tolerable than the next two. All during the lab his legs twitched and blood seeped from his severed face into his quivering mouth. I almost fainted. The second vivisection was for a frog's gastrocnemius muscle. This frog had been "pithed" the traditional way, where a needle was inserted through the base of its skull and then twisted around, scrambling its brain, "ending its pain." It was then pithed a second time, the needle inserted down the spinal canal to destory the spinal cord. As my lab partners laughed at how the frog's skin came off "like a pair of pants" and squealed at how slippery the living leg muscle was, I just sat silently. I could feel the glassy eyes of the frog staring at me, and when I dared to look, I could have sworn I saw it crying. Then the professor took the bone cutters and clamped down on the femur, ripping the bone from the frog so that we could "more easily handle the muscle." The frog's toe never stopped twitching.
Today was the third, and thankfully last vivisection of the class. Again the frog was double-pithed the traditional way. This frog was smaller than the others, and greener, and cuter. Its legs twitched more often and forcefully than the previous two. The professor said he might have messed up the second pithing a little, but that we shouldn't worry, it still couldn't feel. My group carefully lifted the skin above the sternum and snipped it away. Then carefully they pulled up the sternum, revealing a tiny beating heart. Coldly, we went through the experiment, measuring the changes in the heart rate when different chemicals were applied. This was the first vivisection I actually participated in and was starting to think I had become desensitized to the inhumane procedure. Then as I got more "frog ringers" ready to drench the heart, my lab partner suctioned some liquid from around the heart. Suddenly both the frogs legs kicked out desperately and then crossed, twitching horribly. I cried out. It was horrible. Why is such an experiment legal?
Okay, I know, I know, supposedly the pithing ends all pain, which I don't know if I completely believe, but even if that is true, I am pretty sure that the actual pithing procedure does involve pain. A needle jabbed into the back of the head is bound to be excruciating, and if this procedure was done on humans, it would not be tolerated. This is the kind of "experimenting" the nazi doctors did. Why should it matter whether it is a frog or a human being dissected alive? How can students be forced to do such experiments and be traumatized for life? And with the modern technology we have, why must so many innocent animal lives be sacrificed for "science" whenever computer programs exist to teach students the same information without any life being taken?
Now, I am no huge animal rights activist or anything. I like some meat, i'll admit i've worn fur. It's only whenever something so horrible and unnecessary is shown to me do I really feel the need to step in. I hope someday the pithing will stop. If it doesn't, just watch, someday aliens will come and abduct us and perform the same experiments on us, for compared to them we might be as unintelligent and insignificant as a frog.