When animals are profitable stock
Living breathing care
It’s not a voyage to paradise
It’s a painfully dark despair
Transferred from grassy villas
Or perhaps a greasy barn
And crammed into a prison hold
Upon a raging sea
Rocked about and frightened
Disrespectfully
Standing in one’s foot print
No fresh air at all
Hot and stuffy
Noisy vile
For freedom it feels more like trial
An ugly uncomfortable undertow
You become cargo down below
Nobody cares you are on your own
Perhaps a herd load
You have known
A lot better but now you
Are made to stand
The journey through
Remonstrating breathing pains
Nothing to drink little to see
Standing fidgeting nothing gains
From lack of movement tragically
The sights and sounds of awful fear
Collective shit from ear to ear
Suffering and ugly pain
Nightmarish visions worked with strain
Cries and belching
Excrement
None of this is heaven sent
Torture guides the aching heart
Vehemently from the start
The worse for wear
It’s rapidly
Obvious upon the sea
Lousy air and dirty stalls
Diseased eyes the devil calls
Out to us on nightly sweats
It’s all added to the debts
We pay as animals bound to be
Slaughtered just ingloriously
Heaving this way heaving that
Feeling sick that’s where we are at
Bruised and buckled
Broken we
Chafed and sore so violently
Left to worry left to feel
Sadness all this is for real
We can hear our hearts
We can feel the pain
We sweat we are cold we are sick again
Worms and bugs a constant threat
The stench of life
They surly let
Us suffer off to god knows where
Living cargo such despair
The unruly souls of farming men
Who get their profit
And wonder when
Not how we are
Not how we feel
We are spent
They conceal
The gross ugliness we’ve become
The pain and suffering
All and some
Broken bones and death as well
On the ship consigned to Hell
Vomiting farting shitting pissing
Aching violently just missing
All the good things of fresh green grass
Of clover too
and our poor arses
Sore as hell
and maggoty
Flies just everywhere we see
Live exports the anathema
The hot dark violent
Searing scar
Deep in our bones we suffer so
Nobody cares wherever we go
Bound for the Middle East
That is where
Death and torture
Nobody’s aware
How we suffer
How we cry
So much pain
Not knowing why
Not caring even
They have been paid
We are part of the Live Trade
And are to be slaughtered painfully