Once Again
Once again November’s nightly frosts freeze
rank undergrowth and rats born in the spring
and suckled in summer under a rotting sleeping bag
heaped in a backyard gone to meadow of a house
trashed by tenants and left empty while these rats
grew fat foraging in the Quik-Stop dumpster
by starlight are now ready to move inside, the warmer
the better, but since human animals have come
with all the clutter they bring, and have put money,
which to rats is just stuff to shred for nests,
into it, as they say, poison and peanut butter laden
traps will be set, and before long a fetid and foul
stink will fill the rooms, one room in particular
and one wall in that room, and in the grief,
the consternation and the recriminations
it’s debated: should money, so meaningful in fact
and symbol to the beings of humans, be spent
to smash out this wall, or should the corpse be left
to desiccate in its tomb? So faced with hard choices
one might be forced to consider how a meteor
made a world possible for small furry creatures
always ready for the main chance who given
the time became us, and who, without saying so,
we hate and fear even more than the rats.
rank undergrowth and rats born in the spring
and suckled in summer under a rotting sleeping bag
heaped in a backyard gone to meadow of a house
trashed by tenants and left empty while these rats
grew fat foraging in the Quik-Stop dumpster
by starlight are now ready to move inside, the warmer
the better, but since human animals have come
with all the clutter they bring, and have put money,
which to rats is just stuff to shred for nests,
into it, as they say, poison and peanut butter laden
traps will be set, and before long a fetid and foul
stink will fill the rooms, one room in particular
and one wall in that room, and in the grief,
the consternation and the recriminations
it’s debated: should money, so meaningful in fact
and symbol to the beings of humans, be spent
to smash out this wall, or should the corpse be left
to desiccate in its tomb? So faced with hard choices
one might be forced to consider how a meteor
made a world possible for small furry creatures
always ready for the main chance who given
the time became us, and who, without saying so,
we hate and fear even more than the rats.
