The Anthrax by Dr. Spoofs
At the far end of town
Where the tiny spore grows
and the wind brings pain and death when it blows
and nothing lives; not even old crows...
in the street was the deadly Anthrax.
And deep in the dry grass, some people say,
if you look hard enough you can still see today
where the anthrax once laid
and bodies decayed
before somebody deconned the Anthrax away.
And what was the Anthrax?
And why was it there?
And how did the wind blow and spread it somewhere
from the far end of town where the sparse grass grows?
The chem specialist still works here.
Ask him, HE knows.
You won't see the chem guy.
You can't knock on his door.
He stays in his tent, with dirt for a floor.
He decons equipment in a place you can't reach
And launders uniforms with Super Tropical Bleach.
And on moonless, dark nights in Summer
he peeks
out of the tent
and sometimes he speaks
and tells you how the Anthrax was deconned away.
He'll tell you, perhaps...
if you're willing to pay
attention to whatever
he has to say.
At the end of the tent
he sits down real hard
and studies the name on your
protective mask card.
He'll measure your face
from the desk where he sits
and issues your mask
and makes sure that it fits.
Then he stashes your mask card
away in a box
and weighs the lid down
with two or three rocks
Then he grunts, "I will call you by field telephone,
for the secrets I tell you are for your ears alone."
RRRRING!
You lift the field telephone up to your ear,
and the specialist's whispers are not very clear
since they have to come over
a reel of field wire
The volume is low-
It can't get any higher.
"Now I'll tell you," he says, with his face turning gray,
"how the Anthrax was lifted and taken away...
It all started way back...
such a long, long time back..."
Way back in the days when the grass was still green
and the sky was stlii blue
and the air was still clean
came Soviet missiles dropping from space...
One morning I came to this hideous place
And I found the first spores!
The Anthrax spores!
The microscopic hard-shelled Anthrax spores!
Drifting mile after mile on the fresh morning breeze
were the spores that drive living things down to their knees.
I saw our guys donning their chemical suits-
with hooded masks, gloves and green vinyl boots.
But those spores! Those spores!
Those Anthrax spores!
All day I'd been searching
for spores such as those.
They get in your lungs
and all over your clothes.
They have a shell as hard as a nail
and the smell, they tell me,
is musty and stale.
I felt a great twinge
of pain in my back.
I was trained what to do!
I unloaded my pack.
I mixed up the bleach
and sprayed all around
and soaked all the spores
that covered the ground.
But a stiff breeze came up
and blew away each
of the spores not covered
with Super Tropical Bleach.
I yelled at our leader,
"What DO we do now?
What do we do?
When, where, why and how?'
He said we must do a wind vector plot
on an overlay showing
areas downwind now hot.
The spores reached a distance of thirty kilometers.
We measured the distance on our Humvee odometers.
On a ninety degree angle
from where they came down
the Anthrax spores landed
on country and town.
"There are millions and billions!
What can we do?
We're just a small biological
decontamination crew.
So call out the Army, Marines,
and the Navy!"
shouted a hysterical Captain,
a fellow named Davy.
The soldiers were shaking and very much scared.
So I entered the tent as quietly as I dared.
As I walked to the front, I saw General McKew.
He glared at my chem suit and said,
"Just WHO are YOU?"
I said, "I am the chem guy. I speak about Anthrax.
I have been well trained and I know all the facts.
Tell the civilians that the best place to hide
is to go into their homes and shelter inside.
Take some large buckets and go fill up each
with a 9 to 1 ratio of water and bleach.
Tape up all the windows and cracks around doors.
Wipe down the furniture and mop up the floors.
As soon as they've finished and their houses all clean
they're minds will relax, if you know what I mean."
Said the General, "It's great to wash down walls and floors,
but how do we clean up this mess out of doors?"
"Check out the map-and this distance! Oh, dear.
The area's too big for the Army to clear."
"We need something quick and we need it today
to make sure that those Anthrax spores don't blow away."
I said, "General, we need a huge sprayer to reach
all the spores on the ground from here to the beach."
He called up the Air Force and said, "Please come quick,
before the civilians around here get sick."
So the Air Force flew over with chemical sprayers,
covering the landscape with layers and layers
of Super Tropical Bleach before rain came around
and washed all the Anthrax spores
into the ground
where they could lurk in the earth
for many a year
until favorable conditions let them reappear.
By thew time sundown came, our mission was over.
We destroyed all the Anthrax
from Philly to Dover.
I cleaned up my equipment and put it away
in case it was needed on some other day.
But please heed my warning...
Watch the weather conditions, for you never know
If the Anthrax might come back
when the soft breezes blow.
With apologies to Dr. Seuss and the "Lorax".
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