we had to chop up dead animals in biology class/
mr science was smiling underneath his ginger beard/
carrying in a pile of dead laboratory rats held high
on a tray/ with a towel on one arm like a waiter/
throughout the class rat corpses were mutilated/
students laughing & chucking organs at each
other from across the room/ stretching out the
intestines against wooden rulers & holding them
up like stringed instruments or 'the catch of the
day' / the squabbling louder than the teacher
trying to shout over the top of it about what we
should be learning/ nobody heard him/ hearts &
bowels were slipped into school bags/ rat blood
up to the elbows & stained on yellow school shirts/
there was enough blood still left in the rats to be
smeared around/ hairy pink tails were chopped off
& thrown up into the fans/ mutilated corpses rolling
onto their fat sides off science benches/ hitting the
the floor with a plop in sections/ a pregnant rat was
cut open & her tiny pink babies pulled out & laid
across the bench/ we counted nine/ until this point
i had stood amongst this lesson frozen/ until all
the mutilation & laughter became unreal or less
physical like an echo/ at this point i reached down
with the scissors & cut my rat's pink nose off/
although the rat was dead i'll never understand
why i did it/ it was as though i couldn't cope with
school life anymore/ i felt broken down/ my life
was a long way off/ it was my way of saying, 'you
win. i lose.'/ i was giving up/ i had lost the plot/ i will
always carry the thought of the dissected rat with
me/ its mutilated body, its eternal absence & tiny
pink nose/ the size of the head of a pin/ on my palm