My brothers and sisters
deceased and digesting.
I try to lie still
but I tremble and pray like a coward.

A sword and four daggers
descend, casting shadows.
I don’t want to die!
But I’m scraped from the plate and I plummet

Land splat on a family
of crushed, soggy tea bags
Caged up in a carcass
of dry bones and flesh decomposing

The lid slams. I feel like
I’m trapped in my old tin
But this time I’m suffocating
in the stench and the darkness

Then light flares, an air surge
I gasp for my life
But the fingers above
knot the plastic black sack as I’m screaming

The teabags beneath me
colliding and jolting
in time with the footsteps
Then just for a second we’re flying

A thud and we crash
I fall under the carcass
past slimy, dead lettuce,
between mouldy parmesan cheese

A distant sound screeches -
approaching and hungry
A monster whose rumbling
belly vibrates the whole street

A cannibal beak
stabs and tears the black membrane.
I spill from the hole
and roll into a crack on the pavement.

A fog of hot monster breath
gases and chokes us
Its metal jaws grinding
The magpie escapes to its tree top

The bag and its innards -
scooped up and lobbed skywards,
One gulp then devoured.
I grieve for the family of teabags.

Weeks pass and I shrivel.
Bean baked by the sunshine.
Surrounded by moss
and my neighbours, the ants and two earwigs,
who presume I’m a small lump of gravel,
living life in a crack on the pavement
growing old in my home on the pavement.

©2011 Mark Bird