Thank you from one chicken just rescued from Hell

A battery of cages
no water
just a drain
under one’s feet
of wire that lets
the excrement
that’s lain
eventually
drop into
a bowel and that is that
this is called existence
and this is where I was at

Thanks to men and batteries
my home was a small cage
and here I stood in purgatory
for an utter age
in pain a dirty dishevelled rake
that lays and egg or two
but as soon as that stops
happening you are sent
to oblivion, you

a chicken of the new age
this vile life cloaked in pain
darkness evil nothing else
you are struggling in vain
until a day when rescued
by ALF and that appeals
the sunshine on your feathers
you know now how that feels

some worms a piece of apple
even a slug or two
pecking at a grassy verge
this is what chickens do

and I am one such chicken
rescued, I can say
I said goodbye to the evil
the vile the dull decay
to those gruesome sheds
and those cages
and the ugly tribe who came
to sometimes change our water
but, it was them I have to blame

they spilled the water every time
they were clumsy and inept
so we were left to cry inside
nobody’s adept
to those wires that cut into my feet
and on them I couldn’t stand
we fall about in agony
in our heads we all have planned

the great escape but seldom
do we get the chance to fly
and most who have attempted it
of course each one did die
but still to leave this prison
this inhuman hell hole we
would do anything so I’m fortunate
the pure daylight to see

my rescuers were women
with lovely smiles, for me
soft hands a lovely attitude
angels I could see
the battery was a nightmare
but a heavenly place is where
I now am, and its good to be alive
again and to share

all the wild simplicity
of freedom in the field
the sun the breeze the companionship
and all that that does yield
the loving from the humans
so different from where I
had come to live and thought in fact
it would be where I would die