It was the morning glory
wreathed around the jersey’s
horns that turned you into
a vegetarian. The beast stood
there in the green pasture
like some bovine Ophelia,
brown, beautiful and tragic,
trailing white flowers, green hearts.
How could I ever eat you? you
murmured and made a pact
with the future never to do so.

I, with my eyes on the traffic lights,
missed the scene and the promise,
being concerned with the more
immediate future by depressing
the throttle and heading down the road.

In any case, my convolvulus
was not morning glory, but
bindweed, not beautiful, being
a depressing throttle of a vine itself:
smothering, persisting, insisting
on its own survival at the expense
of everything else. Rather like
ourselves, I guess. Which is why
I hated it so much, battled with it
with a fury, pointlessly ripping its
hateful fecundity from the currant
bushes,  scrabbling, tearing the fleshy
spaghetti of its white roots from
the reluctant soil only pausing
from time to time to dream of sirloin.

– James Norcliffe