THE COTTON BUD FLUSHERS

Do you know what the bad people do?
They flush their cotton buds down the loo!
They say they don't but I know they do -
Because they're evil through and through
The rotten sinners form a queue
And flush their cotton buds down the loo.
Each bad woman and each bad man
Flushing cotton buds down the pan

And shoals of little plastic skewers
Wave goodbye and head for the sewers
Their ends all smeared with earwax gel,
Holding their breath and swimming like hell,
Using their fluffy candy-floss brains
To find their way through the pipes and drains.
Their instincts tell them where to be -
They think: the place for me is the sea!

They float with the flotsam and they bob past boats
And some get stuck in the fishes' throats
But the rest do not rest until they reach
A distant unsuspecting beach
And there they sit and refuse to rot
'Cos their made of plastic and they just DO NOT
(For if of plastic you are made
You never, NEVER biodegrade

That goes for wrappers, bottles, bags,
Hangers, fasteners, plastic tags…)
They certainly crumble, as all things must
But they linger forever as a kind of dust
That chokes the birds and eels and snails
And sticks in the gullet of enormous whales
And one day, life will be no more,
Just plastic dust from shore to shore.

But the cotton bud flushers do not care,
Twixt John O' Groats and Finisterre,
The cotton bud flushers should be ashamed
The cotton bud flushers deserve to be named;
But we are not cotton bud flushers -
We're not-on-your-nelly-bud-flushers!
We're saints of the bathroom, we have no sin,
We put our cotton buds IN THE BIN!*

 

*Or, even better, we buy the kind that biodegrade

 

Richard Medrington 2006