Elephant

If the numbers of particles and antiparticles were symmetrical

This world could not exist.

Antiparticles would, like poachers, annihilate the particles.

There’d be no elephants.

Luckily, so far, there are more elephants than poachers.

So your camera can shoot elephants like me.

That fact matters.

Because of the broken symmetries Nature was able to make you and me.

I’m not a cosmic freak.

I am a beauty, not in a dog-smuggler Johnny Depp symmetrical sort of way.

My head is awesome.

One dump of mine could fertilise a whole rose garden.

It is not funny being chased by stinging bees, having to run

Nearly as fast as neutrinos.

But perhaps it is funny when you think of the size of the bee

Chasing my massive ass,

Causing it to vibrate in ten dimensions in time and space.

I’ll explain my right ear another time.

Herd meet-ups are fun.

Water-blasting each other with our trunks is a real bond-builder.

Cooling in the surging heat,

We discover our hearts beating to the rhythm of the plains.

We honour our dead.

My own tusks are on the short side but they are mine.

There is no other way I could be; inescapably I am intrinsically valuable

From tip of trunk to tuft of tail.

To modify me without destroying the whole elephant me is impossible.

The squiggly tail on my ass is perfect.

There’s nothing good about an elephant family carved from ivory.
I don’t want to be just a tusked silk-screen on a cool schoolyard shirt.