Help, I’ve fallen in a fatberg and I can’t get out.

I have spelunked the greasy caverns of Johannesburg,

I have scaled the dripping chasms under Tokyo,

I have seen the tallows glowing under Texas,

and now I’ve fallen in the frying pan.

I’ve fallen in the fry and I’m worried I will die.
Rancid carbohydrates, rank oils send me visions.

Ahab skating over a white tidal wave

of fat in search of whales of blubber bubbles

far beneath Manhattan’s streets.

Whales and whales to wash away the world,

and I am in God’s glaucous eye,

balanced on the scales.
Fat angels, chubby cherubs

flexing their pudgy biceps in these clotted catacombs.

Michelangelo’s Steak Night.  Raphael’s Taco Tuesday.

Pray for me, oh buxom angels.  Pray for me,

oh big boned Venus, labouring out of the narrow confines

of a shell.

The fumes batter at my brain and I am undone.

Help me, you phalanx of broad Valkyries,

lay down your deliveries of Uber Eats,

set down Wong’s Dumplings, Bob’s burgers,

for they have laid me low.
Beware, beware. A clotted cream maw has opened

and it speaks of doom.

A maelstrom clings to my hips and threatens to

liposuction me in.

There are grottos here:

toilet paper lying in streamers,

tendrilled mucous, treasure to be found,

pound for congealed pound,

eddies which can take me under until

I scream.  I scream for icecream.

I scream to the Lard, but it will avail me nothing.

I have fallen in a fatberg, and I can’t get out.
There’s a mountain of plastic somewhere in the ocean.

A floating island.  Tir na nOg, Avalon, Brasil.

I’ve read it’s guarded by a Moray Eel

grown monstrous on microbeads of plastic.

Grey jelly shopping bags.

Heroes which scramble to its salt-drenched summit

must face an undying knight.

But that may just be fancy.

I’ve fallen in an oleaginous stew,

and I don’t know what to do.
The wise men of Shambala, Tibet,

must ascend one more peak of decomposing vegetables,

I’m told.

Ploughed over surplus crops, slightly blemished designer fruit,

rough homespun produce not allowed to float the market,

offered by pilgrims from a fleet of trucks with

Walmart logos on them.

But this is someone else’s problem.

But this is someone else’s nightmare, not my struggle.

I’ve fallen in the rubble of a fatberg bubble

and I can’t get up.
I’ve cleared the pipes of Shanghai and of London.

Scraped the running porcelain of Singapore.

I’ve marvelled at the marble under Paris

and seen my face in copper in Peru.

But somewhere on that journey, things have darkened.

The world’s gut has fowled with slabs of floating fat,

and all that was beautiful in these cisterns of hollowed heaven,

of the long intestines loomed under Sydney,

all ordered and shiny and all new,

are stretch-marked with colour now, in apoplexy blue

and while the world is hurtling towards a heart attack,

I’ve dropped my hose somewhere hereabouts.

I’ve fallen in a fatberg, and I can’t get out.