Tug Dumbly - Biology

Biology

A hot afternoon, and a film

from the Department of Education relic vault

snickers through the ratchet –

dividing amoebas, molecules, cells.

Something microbiological

in the old film stock itself

as it apes its subject matter

with the accrued glitch

of a thousand screenings –

dust squiggles, mosquito wrigglers

and pubes boing and frog-kick

across the ancient sea of the screen,

collide with splitting cilia and flagella.

It’s the slow whip beat of a galley ship  

to this slumped bench of the Third Form,

chained before the alter of the Bunsen.

They half sleep on sweaty arms, or smudge

a heart with a pen on a salt wrist, or etch  

a swastika in a desk with a compass,

as the parkinsoned ceiling fans

slowly wobble round, and the downed

blinds lazily clack like false teeth

in the hot sirocco leaking through

the windows, and that melting Dali clock

above the board yawns and mocks,

tocks backwards, away from Three,

to the primeval dawn of the day.