Robbing the Hood

As if the fairy tale were to be lost,

Robin Hood and his gallant men,

In the gallows, at the end, they are found.

Theresa not one for sympathy,

Nor those that vote her in.

Give to the rich, steal from the poor.

Robin Hood, Robin Hood,

We want to frack in Sherwood.

On biodiversity we live or die

As the fine orange grains of desert sands
Expand with the rising sun,
Into new lands, aflame, the soils erode
To meandering dunes and smother
The withered fields in June.

But all the while and under the surface,
Barely scratched, the next great deserts
May be the wettest ones of all.
Amid tragic waste a vast expanse
Of liquid drowned by solid mass.

A message in a plastic bottle, lost
Forty years in the stomach of Nemo,
Swept up and aloft by the wings of a gull
And found once again by a rugged carcass
Lying next to a rotting skull.

On biodiversity we live or die,
No matter if cruise missiles rain from the sky,
A nuclear winter is no more of a splinter
To mother nature's beating heart
On which our civilised world relies.

In the eyes of the destroyer
the savage lives a simple life,
But the want to be at one with nature
Is the elixir for all to thrive.
On biodiversity we live, or die.

But let's all be aware that organic is a lie.
Also gluten has never ever been in rice,
So can we please stop paying an extortionate price based on disproportionate, bullshit advice?
Organic and gluten free are as provably healthy as homeopathy.

Let's also be clear there's as much medicine in here as there is truth in a crocodile tear.

And please, vaccinate your children. Measles is real.
Anti-vax roughly translates to vacuous prats.

The same vacant beings who believe in anti-vaccine probably also believe in vaginal steaming,

Honestly, that's a thing.

Detoxing on organic kale, ignoring the fact their liver and kidneys will prevail.

Organic is not gonna save the world.
There's a point, to a point,
But every sip that we drink
Is taken from the drips of an unnatural sink.

A rain-fed human is as rare as a grass-fed steak.

Though,

Not all cows are created equal,
Not all meat is evil.

#NotAllCows

Nature and nurture are intertwined
And since the very beginning of human time,
We've adapted our habitat to suit our needs
So now we have flour and bread to knead.

Now we know of proteins, genomes and genes,
We can splice a slice of sense into seeds
and train a new breed in the biohackosphere,
So on this sphere, we can use our lands
With a bit more nouse and temper nature's destructive sands.

Last year,
I painted a painful picture
And this year the picture gets murkier still,
Though Angela Merkel is holding the fort
While the English world splutters
Through buckets of pigswill.

On both sides of the Atlantic pond, we've got two twits waving a magic wand,
One's backing Brexit, the other's packing exit visas.
Theresa's not the brightest spark either and Donald's hair flies like the lark,
They're both chatting breeze.

In Manchester, the town I got both my degrees,
Just this week blasted to smithereens.
Children and teens.
A city of invention, which drove me to dream,
The home of feminism, the commuter, the computer and factories,
Where the atom was split and we just discovered graphene.
A community brought to tears, but never to its knees.

And let's never forget the refugees who pay the price for these malicious deeds every single day.

But let's not let these extreme Dis-Mays get us down in the Donald Trump Dumps these days.

See, while we've got isolationist jeers
Drowning our statuses in emoji tears,
We're coming together, not falling apart,
Though Facebook ain't the best place to start.

It's fine online to rant and rage
But better to dance in a morning rave
Surrounded by people who spend their days
Making a difference not public displays.

Inspiring solutions like agrilution,
TFF is at the heart of the next green revolution.

Cultivating companies like Henlight and FoPo,
Since our adventure started six years ago,
From Bombay to Brasil and Trinidad and Tobago,
It's been a thrill and delight to watch this movement grow

And sow the next generation's seeds,
Ensuring 10 billion will not need
To worry when they'll next have dinner

And I'm sure you can't wait to find out the winner.

A Painful Picture

Part 1: A painful picture

It paints a painful picture,
A technicolour world rendered greyscale.
Coral reefs bleached and deceased,
algae, pickled, under battery acid seas.

A fickle audience consumes
Organic vegetables in a plastic bag.
And in the stomachs of seabirds exhumed -
plastic bits of plastic shit in plastic fish of plastic doom.

Plastic thread on plastic looms,
As if the wool of two or three billion sheep
Is somehow a luxurious commodity.
2016 - a batshit insane odyssey, through scorching fields and burning rain.

This swarm of seven billion sprawls,
Slashing trees and spitting fire.
Orangutans toasted in napalm pyres
For palm oil, so we can eat Nutella.

Part 2:  Venereal disease

It's like watching Fern Gully on repeat -
A self-perpetuating cycle of folly
In which we go to the cinema, guzzle down 24 ounces of crap
From buttered popcorn to Coca-Cola,
Repeating the same mistake over and over.

We're living a real-life Avatar,
Paving the forest with bitumen tar,
Trucks penetrating far inside
Lasciviously as Rasputin pleasured the Russian court
With a mangled crown of genital warts.

This pestilence we spread,
Like venereal disease through a harem
But in the form of soybean.
It's like super-gonorrhoea, no antibiotic, we can't stop it -
I've got to have my steak.

No round of applause
But just like the clap
Doing the rounds between young ones unstrapped,
The drugs we pump into fat-laden cattle
Will leave us last in our bacterial battle.

Part 3:  The chicken-cow-shellfish-human caterpillar

SARS, swine flu, bovine TB,
Do we really need to vaccinate against all of these,
Or should we just eat less bacon?
Maybe that's the mistake we're making.
Seven billion hungry mouths parasitizing a world of fat-laden sows.

It's not that we eat meat, it's the way we farm it.
To put on mass, cows used to eat grass.
Alas, now one third of our total grain gets farted out as methane
From the arses of cattle
And lashes back down as nitric acid rain.

Soybean, maize - all goes to feed chickens, caged.
Chickens, writhing in mounds of piss and shit.
Piss and shit, scooped up and pelleted,
Then fed to cows to produce more shit.  We feed chicken shit to cows!
We eat meat that eats shit because we can hardly produce enough food for us never mind it.

100 000 metric tonnes of shit produced each minute
In the USA alone.
Flows straight into the Gulf of Mexico...
A six and a half thousand square mile deadzone,
Expanding each year, forget BP oil - there's a Mississippi sized sewer.

Excrement starves our seas of life,
Amidst ocean acidification and temperature rise
We've got eutrophication and toxic red tides.
The algae back to bite us,
Despite us.

The irony is,
That toxic algae make toxic shellfish.
So the shit we feed to cows,
Which shit into the seas,
Comes back to haunt our own evacuating bowels.