Message in a Mollusc


You, Creature of my world,
whose grounds I once shared
whose home I once shared
whose horizons I once shared.

You breathe oxygen in
but don’t breathe it out,
turn the family atmosphere
poisonous as a closed room.

Your eyes are as gluey a well
of self pity dug with a spade of
coin counted one on one as you
calculate and weigh success.

Though you work like a slave
you retired from life long ago
your world is all inside you, a
univalve being inside its shell.

You seive out the crumbs of living
you concrete the mercury as spirit;
you invalidate the life of vision
you abolish soul in that thick a skin.

Yours is the predictable God
staged for a televised church
whose thin line of silver slimes
every snail path you to take...

carrying a cruel-heart in dry clag
galvanised in gossamer glamour,
a mother-pearly selfish shell, my
house-owner evolved-slug father.


24 April 2003 © Wayne David Knoll

First published in the Forward Press anthology ‘Prisms Of Light’
30 Sept 2003 Ed. Heather Killingray Poetry Now, Peterborough UK,