Unnatural Selection
Pumpkin, oh plumpling, oh hideous mutant !
The hothouse of Hades is where you were born !
Nobody thinks of your yellow-starred flowers,
They only remember your potbellied spawn.
An fragile annual, a delicate diva,
Confined to the plots of the greenhouse and garden.
You won’t survive long in the wastelands and margins,
Where squirrels will eat you before you can harden.
Sclerosified skin in an orange-palled jaundice,
With five-fingered leaves and with deep, sucking roots,
And a hunger voracious to fatten grotesquely
Your thickly-pus’d tumours, your Frankenstein fruits.
So pump up the pumpkins, fatter and fatter,
You’re nothing but water and tasteless matter –
Your heads then trepanned to scoop out your cortex,
Yet still you’re invading our legends and doorsteps.
Yet many won’t make it – mistakes of blind nature,
All twisted or stunted, or rotting while still on the vine.
And if they’re not ripe by the first frost, they’re lost.
Oh Lord, what have we created ? Oh monstrous design !
