Six short lines, one unbroken sentence, almost no punctuation: Ram Krishna Singh's "Man or Animal" reads like a glimpse from a car window, and that is much of its point. The eye catches a carcass on the road and moves on. The poem lingers just long enough to ask what a death is worth once the traffic has passed.
It opens on two fates set side by side. "Some animals are buried" uses a verb that belongs to ritual and mourning, while others "rot on the highway." The word "rot" is short, heavy and unsoftened, and it lands at the end of its line like something dropped. No driver is named and no mourner appears. The poem keeps its gaze on the bodies.
The middle lines are the most inventive. "Unrecycled by vultures / uneaten by worms" stacks two negatives built the same way, the repeated "un-" sounding like a bell tolling twice. Vultures from above and worms from below suggest a full cycle in which nature takes the body back. "Recycled" is a word from bins and factories, not from the wild, so using it here quietly casts vultures as nature's waste-disposal workers. The poem gives no reason for their absence. It simply shows a body that gets neither burial nor the grim dignity of decay, left in between like litter.
Then comes the line break that does the most work. "But run" ends one line and "over by wheels" begins the next, so the sentence is itself run over, tipped across the line-ending as a body is tipped under a tyre. The phrase falls apart at the break. After this the poem names wheels, not drivers: "wheels that don't care." Responsibility drains out of the human and into the machine. The indifference belongs to the object, and the person at the steering wheel has disappeared from the scene.
The last line is the hardest to pin down: "the shit—man or animal." It echoes the idiom "don't care a shit," here clipped so the article vanishes and the phrase hits harder. On that reading, the wheels don't care a shit whether what lies beneath them is man or animal. A second reading is also possible. The swear word may describe the remains themselves, a living thing reduced to waste. The dash holds both meanings together and then hands the final phrase back to the title, which can be heard as a flat statement ("it makes no difference") or as a question ("which was it?"). The poem never settles which.
Its form suits this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only plain, slightly flat speech in lines of uneven length, as if the poet refused to dress the scene up. Even the lack of a full stop at the end has an effect: the sentence stops without closing, the way a road simply goes on. The diction is stripped and the tone offhand, almost shrugging, and the contrast between that casual voice and the grim subject is what makes the poem unsettling. It sounds as unbothered as the wheels it describes, and the reader is left to supply the outrage.
The poem's significance lies in a quiet sleight of hand. It begins with animals ("some animals are buried") yet ends with "man or animal," and by that point the reader has been led to picture a human body in the same place. The poem never says so outright. The idea comes from the logic of the lines: if the road is blind to the difference, the difference may be thinner than we like to think. The title can also be turned back on the reader. Who is behaving like the animal here, the creature on the tarmac or the world rolling over it without a glance?
There is no consolation and no sermon in these six lines, only an image of modern life moving too fast to notice what it crushes. That refusal to comfort is what makes the poem stay with you.