Note: This poem is inspired by the news about stand-up comedians, cartoonists, poets, and writers in jail.
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Bits, chits, chunks, dunks, and bites
Grovels, howls, bursts, busts, and slights
Even vanity-stuffed insights
Or those with badges of rights
End up as pigshit.

Pigs do not think twice
Even rhymes taste just as nice
They nibble gobble virtue and vice
Also ‘forwards’ rolled in spice
Pigs also love their pigshit.

Pigs would, if they could
Mix online updates in food
Broadcasts might taste good…
To refuse refuse is rude
Pigs do not dishonour pigshit.

Pigs are the coolest of all
They’d accept an online brawl
A cartoonist’s scrawl
Even a politician’s gall…
Every word, at some point, is pigshit.

But read what we write, piggy dear
So other pigs here
Pause to hear
Before they scarf and clear
To turn our world into pigshit.

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Note: This poem was first published in Visual Verse – February 2021 – the image is by Tom & Judy Moore. The Visual Verse email informs me that “these tech-savvy little pigs are from Tom or Judy Moore, a multifunctional artist and busy little bee based in Berlin. They’ve exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, ICA London, and Whose Museum. They sing and teach drawing in Berlin, co-curate the Visual Verse Instagram and create the comic Everything is Somewhat Repaired, a phenomenal body of work and continual source of inspiration, humour and humanity for us this past year.”

Image by Tom & Judy Moore - Visual Verse - February 2021 edition
Image by Tom & Judy Moore – Visual Verse – February 2021 edition
All writing is pigshit - Visual Verse - February 2021
All writing is pigshit – Visual Verse – February 2021
All writing is pigshit - illustration by Arvind Passey
All writing is pigshit – illustration by Arvind Passey

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Arvind Passey
Poem written on 29 January 2021