Inuka and my mother

I don’t have this coat on for nothing

its meant to keep me alive

in the coldest of climates

minus 50 degrees

how else could I survive

but, I am not living in those

wretched climes

Singapore is my new place

its in the tropics and is very hot

its something that I have to face

that hot tropical sun

I tell you I’m done

its sweltering and I can feel

my heart pounding so

how I  wished I could go

back to my mother for real

before she died

she told me

she’d cried

almost every day at this heat

how our coats get so dry

and really thats why

its really too much of  a feat

to stay here just so

singaporeans

can come and gawp at us all day

we have to suffer like crazy

it s a price far too high

that we pay

I am sick in my being

for being

stuck in  this concrete pit where

I cant even think of the cold climes

and my life is just downright despair

human earthlings are such selfish people

they treat us as slaves in their zoos

this is not heaven its hell of their making

I know this for you its not news

you probably know how we’re thinking

you possibly come here as well

seeing a polar bear stuck in the tropics

is interesting and you can tell

your children about it

how we survive in temperatures 50 below

its great education but why wont you learn

we should not be part of your show

we need the cold polar ice caps and all

not a picture painted on a concrete wall

we need the ice in our watering hole

not steaming with mozzies that

are always on call

biting us sucking our blood clean away

making us sick day and a day

not the dead  fish out of a pail

we need some fresh food

some seal or some whale

shelba my mother she gave up and died

she will be waiting on the other side

waiting for me for she knows in her heart

how awful it was that we both had to part

zoo’s are an anathema profit based places

where little men sit with the  ugliest faces

decide our fate in some boardroom somewhere

promising all of us abject despair