“Bones”

There was a time not long ago
When a King reigned and was seen
But now it’s an absurdity
And some might say obscene
To imagine my iconic stature
Taken now to be
Purely a pain in someone’s arse
A nuisance actually

Born free and those roaring days
When big cats were respected
Now we are poisoned and can hunted
We really are dejected
About All of this now going down
It really isn’t fair
The vagaries of hunting
And those clowns so unaware

developing a strategy
For profit at all cost
The farmers in South Africa
Their morality they tossed
Out into the swamp they did
And set up camps where we
Were kept in tight enclosures
Anything but free

The absurdity of all of this
The governments in tow
Their greasy fingers in the pot
Corruption it does grow
Canned hunting farms are everywhere
They pet our babies young
And cage us all in chicken wire
It’s all about the bung

The government inspectors
Hold their hand out they
Get the bung whenever
And so of course they say
Carry on just carry on
This hunting lark is great
And we can use the lion meat
Which sells at quite a rate

The bones is what we are after
Dried out in the sun
Send them off to Vietnam
And when the day is done
Out there they call them tiger bones
And nobody can tell
The difference adding monkey
And some turtle shell

Making it into a cake
Tiger cake it’s called
And flogging it to Chinese
All of them well schooled
Imagining this tiger cake
From Africa is best
It’s made of our bones Lion bones
But no one has a test

To see that they believe it
What’s written on the bag
And they pay a fortune
With nobody to flag
Up the true deception
More of us get killed
Canned hunting for the rich set
And more of our blood spilled

Where is their intelligence
Their prudence their forethought
Surely they must realise
Exactly what they have bought
In fact it’s their backwardness
They are an un enlightened lot
Obscurantists in a moment
No sensible they are not

We are now worth more dead it seems
Which is insanity
The farmers their psychosis
It’s all about money
For them it is a sickness
Their gullibility
Profound really in many ways
Depressives actually

For us though there is apathy
Hopelessness for we
Are lost souls in so many ways
Eye openers we be
Thoroughly disconcerted
About how our lives pan out
And how they look into our eyes
But it’s our bones what that’s about

They lack the imagination
They were born with
They can’t see
The jungle and it’s beauty
And it’s lasting rhapsody
They don’t possess a vision
They have no romance anymore
No meaning really to their lives
Nothing in their core

For them it’s just irrelevance
Twaddle in reverse
A meaningless existence
Under some dark curse
They are always hiding something
Skulking here and there
They seem to find the shadows
Underhand and so unfair
Always men of mystery
In everything they do
Harbingers of horror
Never good nor true

I don’t know what my future holds
Possibly I will
Be drugged up to the eyeballs
Until my blood they spill
Some fat arsed virgin hunter
With bottle glasses comes
Never picked a rifle up before
One of those bums
That accumulates the money
From others he employs
And buys a life which could be mine
And killing he enjoys

But actually that is questionable
For although I am drugged and slow
He aims his gun but misses
And clearly he is slow
The professional will shoot me
And pat him on the back
Tell him what a great shot
His name is on my plaque

He bags his lion and the locals
May get to eat my meat
The bones will all be stripped
And dried
And wrapped up in a sheet
And shipped off to the far east
That’s when I come in to my own
Ground up with the turtle
And some monkey bone

The rainbow bridge
Will beckon
And I will so attend
All my strength and vigour
Will come back in the end
Perhaps reclaim my elegance
And my willingness to be
Forgiving of these farmers
Who fcuk ing murdered me