Based on a certain chapter in Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science, and revelations contained therein about a certain ersatz doctor’s claims about food.

Contains swears.

I’ve heard that if you eat a seed

Your body gets the benefit

Of everything that seed could be

All of the nutrients can fit

Inside that little tiny shell.

And it’s as if you ate a tree

I can’t imagine feeling well

If that happened inside of me.

I read somewhere that leafy greens,

Because of all the chlorophyll,

Oxygenate your blood. It seems

To me that I would feel quite ill

If when I ate a plate of kale

The sunlight could get right inside

My healthy eating kick would fail

If every time I ate I died.

Ms G McKeith’s a lying cunt

So just eat what the fuck you want

Turns out weather loaches are so called because they respond to barometric pressure. This poem is dedicated to my friend Crake’s random guessing of this fact. And to their weather loaches.

Big storm’s a comin’,

I feels it in my scales

I’m tellin you younguns

My instinct never fails.

It may sound mighty strange

And y’all may scoff and giggle

But you know a storm’s a comin’

When you see me start to wiggle.

When I start to dance a gig

Goin’ crazy in my tank

Well the thunder’s on its way

You can take that to the bank.

My powers of prediction

Are way beyond reproach

I ain’t just any fish

I’m a gol’durned weather loach.

Full disclosure, I have never dissected a frog.

In the diagram you are neat.

Lying symmetrical and straight

The incision like a slit

In pastry or perhaps felt.

Your organs tidily separate

Easily seen, their colours bright.

As if your reason to exist

Had only been to educate.

And now, here you are lying

Before me: stunned, pulsating

I drag the scalpel through your writhing

Flesh. Reveal the messy, heaving

Pile of guts. The odour rising

To my nose. The blood seeping

The strange, elastic membranes concealing

The clean, didactic image I had been expecting.

Just a bit of evolutionary fun:

Indohyus said to pakicetus

“This landlubber lark is beneath us!

Let’s go back to the sea

Where cetaceans we’ll be

And our homes can be measured in litres”

My friend Billie tells me that daffodils contain a chemical called galantamine which can help treat early onset dementia.

The only poem I know about daffodils is also about memory.

Coincidence?

(With apologies to William Wordsworth)

I wandered lonely as a cloud

(it’s years since I explored those hills)

But I remember still, the crowd

Of daffodils.

Continuous as the stars that shine

My memory from that bright day

Stretches in never-ending line:

Fades not away.

While others lose the thoughts they seek

And falter, I remember yet

The distant past, and just last week:

I don’t forget.

Perhaps I owe my sharp old brain

To that inspiring, fragrant scene

For daffodils make something named

Galantamine

And now, when on my couch I lie

Thanks to the pollen once inhaled

MY brain’s retained that inward eye

And has not failed.

A sonnet about Dutch tears, aka Prince Rupert drops, as suggested by Alex.

My will is strong, and none of you can break it

I’m indestructible. A real hard case.

Do what you like , I swear that I can take it

Something to say? Then say it to my face!

Try hammers, even bullets! You won’t harm me

You think I’m fragile? You have lost your mind.

Destroy me? You do not even alarm me!

But please don’t ever sneak up from behind.

My toughness comes from being under pressure

And that is in itself a heavy load

So though I can face down any aggressor

Just touch my fragile side and I’ll explode.

Think you’re invulnerable? It doesn’t matter

Somebody knows a way to make you shatter.

Know what I haven’t done in a while? A sestina!

Boom! Up to date in time to start #napowrimo.

Sestinas often bring out the philosopher in me.

The human body is a splendid thing –

Not just an animated bag of blood

A framework coated in pulsating meat

Nor just a neat conveyance for your brain;

It’s both, and it is so much more besides:.

A thinking, feeling, breathing work of art.

But can a body be a work of art?

A body is a scientific thing

Evolved from primal soup, which had no brain

Is this a place where art and science meet?

Where inspiration courses in the blood

What’s art and what is science? Who decides?

Creation? Evolution? Different sides

To this conundrum. Can we call it art

And not see a creator? Here’s the thing

You can admire the beauty of the brain

And know that it’s just complicated meat

But that’s the sort of thing that makes the blood

• .

Of certain people boil. There will be blood

If we deny god. Everyone takes sides!

“It’s merely science!” “No, it’s clearly art!”

They really love to fight over this thing:

I wish that either side would use their brain

And see that these two schools of thought can meet:

A body can’t be art. It’s made of meat

But inspiration courses through the blood

No wait, that’s oxygen, that is the thing

The blood carries around. It isn’t art!

But that does not quite mean I’m taking sides

The place that art is found is in the brain

And sometimes, somehow, we forget the brain

Is just as much a lump of pulsing meat

As any other organ. And the blood

That feeds it helps it think, and it decides

That what it wants to do is make some art

So art is born of science, that’s the thing!

So everything that comes out of your brain

Was fed by blood and brought about by meat

So who decides what’s science and what’s art.

One for Fay. Content note, Sharks.

The worst thing about being a tiny shark

Is not that nobody thinks you are sweet:

It isn’t that there are not any

Adorable internet memes

Of you, charming and winsome,

Like the dolphins, it’s that

You’ll probably

Be eaten

By a

Shark

For Stephanie, a Pantun containing a fact I didn’t know about anteaters.

The spiny anteater lactates

– As mammals do – to feed her young

To find one teat, they just can’t wait:

Her skin gives milk to thirsty tongues

Requested by Caroline, a limerick about this phenomenon

(I don’t usually get my science from Fox News but they had the most succinct headline)

You know that the scientists say

Who we are is in our D.N.A.

But if you unwind

My twin-helix, you’ll find

That I’m mostly not me, anyway!