Interviewing
the Platypus
Why did I go?
Truth be told to test
The GPS navigator
That and to see what it was like.
Cambridge
Is the gate
Through which Britain’s greats must pass
Or else spend their days
Dissing all who went
And all that past.
The navigator figured a route no human
Eye would pick.
The trick is to guide it as best you can;
Part of the way at least, especially at the start.
If I was a girl, I might have faired better at
Encouraging it in the dark
Whilst keeping my heart rate steady.
Being a man, I got lost in all
Kinds of foul weather;
Saw more roundabouts than a chicken farm
Sees feathers; learnt that Britain will never
Run out of villagers with talent
For muddling lost visitors.
Four stony faced pillars;
The science community must be proud
To possess such cairns.
Cadavers could feel the chill
Of their reception.
They work on the duck-billed platypus,
One of nature’s rare crack-ups. Most of the time,
It’s some predator bashing around with a hard-on for
gibbons
But the platypus is like the fat kid
Subduing violence with a joke fashioned
Out of her floppy skin.
Did the Pythons not find their feet here?
Wasn’t this where Zadie Smith first bared her teeth?
I guess I was in the wrong part of the campus. Bad luck.
You’d think the platypus would have made them thaw
Being part duck, part rat, part God-knows-what.
Perhaps I’m being too harsh,
Not doing the writer’s bit,
The part where you see the world through the opposite
slit.
No racism here for sure,
Just an absence of wit.
I see now more clearly why
Not all Jews feel as comfortable here as
Some might reckon.
When I found that out: revelation!
It was the start of a long list: ‘what we have in
common’.
Back in the capital,
I felt settled.
And thought the M25 might one day rise up
To wall the newly hatched republic of London,
Part white, part black, part God-knows-what,
A city-state, mating
Under the rising current.
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