Slugs

Your love has limits you yourself proscribe:
Unusual and humanly unique.
Us hordes of humans have all had a peek
At God and taken off so terrified.
Your love is free and freer than the beasts
Who kill and eat. Red life drips rich from tongues
That howl at moons, but murder was begun
By human hands who kill but still don't eat.
We are the beasts who, beastliness denied,
Devalue slugs and honour predators
With fur for being furry but what's worse
Such slugs as us select simplistic lives.
How would you learn the way the world loves you
Unless urgently you hug the ugly too?

Nik Habermel, September 1996