‘Them animals is disgusting’

In London Zoo is a large flat painted Disneyesque lion
sporting a circular hole cut where the face ought to be.

On its reverse is a step upon which the visitor stands and
puts his own face through the hole – so that he may be thus snapped.

So, the resultant photograph shows the face of a friend or
relative grinning like mad out of a leonine frame.

This seems to be a very popular piece of equipment –
Arabs in nightshirts and Japs queue with Jews. Polaroids click.

Tabloids blown underfoot headline a couple of global débâcles.
Gran, from the lion’s mouth, leers: toothless, cadaverous, blithe.

Oh it is very funny to put your head through the facial
orifice of a joke lion – races and creeds are agreed.

Down the old Monkey House there is a Cercopithecus wanking
and a baboon (with its thumb stuck up its arse) to revile.

The unusually toxic venom of Peter Reading’s poetics is borne less out of an inclination for sociopathy than a sincere distaste for our idiot human compulsions, not least in our relationship with the natural world. Vexed to the point of outrage, Reading’s spleen is almost always brutally expressed, shockingly so in this savage, yet highly perceptive evisceration of ignorance and appropriation.

Here, in a series of couplets, each of which adds a new layer of bile to our lack of self-awareness and our seemingly limitless capacity for self-parody, Reading points a bony finger at the cornucopia of visitors to London Zoo. Playing it straight and with a deadpan, sardonic touch, the poet works his audience with alacrity, in the knowledge that we are also complicit in this charade - denizens, on another day, of the same grotesque.

Barely concealing his own revulsion, Reading renders the daily visitation in attitudes of pastiche, reducing each leonine ‘frame’ to a bestial reflection they might otherwise revile. Whilst tabloid headlines of ‘global débâcles’ are trampled underfoot, and the ‘Arabs’ and ‘Japs’ of xenophobic complacency are transfigured into the animals they now imitate, the hideous rictus of a ‘toothless, cadaverous’ ancient leers blithely on.

Reading’s final lines are a triumph of juxtaposition: heavily ironised by his use of Latin to describe a type of African monkey, the animal’s onanistic urge, and the baboon’s well-placed digit, give the finger to both the prurient, and the disgusted.



‘Them animals is disgusting’ is taken from Ukelele Music, published by Martin Secker and Warburg (1985)