'The Squid'

Justice has gone unserved against the squid;
  his crime: his will to survive,
or rather what he does in order to.
Ever feeding off the fortunes of others,

killing all he must to survive, he
escapes behind a sacrifice
like a coward unable to finish what he started,
like a man running away from his prosecution.
Escaping behind a camouflage,
  he feels no
remorse until he brings about his own end
  simply to escape his fate.



22/02/16

Poet's Notes

This poem explores the banality of evil, where the most ordinary of men in their simple nature may do selfish things in order to achieve the one goal of all living species: survival. It uses the metaphor of a squid to further elaborate on the animalistic nature of mankind, despite it being the most advance and civilised of communities. 

Inspired by a Wattpad post of a friend's (where she told the tale of how she had no clue why she had written the word "squid" to possibly describe Joe Keller from Arthur Miller's All My Sons), I tried to draw the connections and found it soon after some level of research: the squid feeding off the life of others and Keller's feeding his family at the cost of many lives; the squid squirts a distracting black ink to escape and Keller sacrificing Steve Deever as a scapegoat to the angry mob. Then, I thought it would be a good challenge to write a poem based on this concept of linking both Joe Keller's and the squid's animalistic instinct to survive.