The fridge sits purring happily
in the corner of my kitchen,
well-behaved, domesticated,
house-trained even.
Once a week I give it milk and food
and clean the mouldy stuff
from its bottom box.
Open the door, a lightbulb comes on
as if a cartoon character is thinking...
all night long the fridge is dreaming
vague folk-memories
of its ancestors roaming wild
on the plains of the Serengeti -
roaring, not purring,
fridges to be feared -
or their temperate Northern cousins,
lurking in pine woods,
putting the wind up the Picts
like a large white oblong yeti.
Perhaps these days are not yet over.
There must be some still in the wild:
I saw one on Tuesday morning,
lying on its back in the wide grass verge
on the Ludlow bypass,
a roadkill fridge to add to the countless
badgers, foxes, cats and rabbits
littering that highway of death.
From where I read, if I stretch a bit,
I can see my fridge, sitting thinking.
How long will it be satisfied
with just a pint a week
and the odd tray of sausages?
Will it one day pull me in,
a giant Venus fly-trap,
and purr no more, but belch and roar
as, smashing through the veneer
of generations of fridges
tamed, dulled, zombified,
my fridge responds with all its pump
to the call of the wild?
I sit and watch it, stretching a bit.
It sits in the corner, quietly dreaming,
contented,
for now.
Wild Bill Balding
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/domesticated-appliance/
