Doner kebab! O doner kebab!
Often, when I recline beside you,
how I wonder what’s inside you.
Cloven hooves and mad-cow beef,
bits of a bouncer’s blown-out brain,
a suicide-bomber’s fingers and teeth,
an aborted foetus from the high-school lane,
flab from a stockbroker named Justin,
glowing mud from Solway Firth,
scraps from a vivisectionist’s dustbin,
Margaret Thatcher’s afterbirth.
A long-dead poet’s gravestone-lichen,
some hybrid of cauliflower and swede,
rejects from a privatised railway’s kitchen,
the squashed-up snouts of a mongrel breed,
a nerve agent brewed up in Magnitogorsk
or Salisbury, a homeless veteran’s left eye,
the remains of a man who threw ham at a mosque
and was left in an English prison to die.
Some well-cooked flesh from Grenfell Tower,
the tender-whipped flank of a ninth-placed horse,
offal scraped off of a track at rush hour,
fox-meat prised from a beagle’s jaws,
the cancerous bile of a liberal who lost
a vote, so “democracy can go hang”,
bits of an underage girl who’d been tossed
around by a local grooming gang.
Doner kebab! O doner kebab!
Often, when I recline beside you,
how I wonder what’s inside you.
“Chilli sauce?”
