Freddy Rat twerks
atop a titanium cheese vat. Pasteur
his lactose intolerant god
on this earthly olfactory jukebox. The
echo of his footprints
smooths over with fermentation.
Outside the factory, rain rinses itself
off fenders of fake metal, plastic
chrome bumpers, and seeks instead
the metal underbellies, knowing no
good undercoating goes
unscathed by its compatriots, sun and
salt. Even as the arrow
has fled the bow, and buries itself in
the center of a heart
without rhythm or melody, a wooden
love in a world without
wings, Freddy Rat, meantime, dances a
moonwalk at full noon,
when the light is best and his
audience above most appreciative.
His paws pause to admire the warmth
from above as it meets
and matches the silvery warm below.
They are one in this process.
Both powered by progress. The life
force face to face with insatiable
inertia. The dance of death embracing
the fandango of life. Freddy Rat.
Blind Owl
never blinks. Having seen this before
it remains unamused. Who’d have
thought
a rabbit would be so sacrificially
dumb, dumb
enough to hop into its open mouth?
Who’d imagine
a savoury field mouse would follow? Or
a baby shrew?
A peppermint flavoured vole? Blind Owl
is relieved
that skunks keep their distance. He
avoids them
as well. His preferences: rat or
squirrel,
given the chance. Lizard with piri
piri sauce.
Frogs are not fancied. Nor lower life
forms:
worms, snakes, spiders, wasps, moths.
Songbirds
are a default delicacy. It’s the
challenge that matters
most. Appetizers are never refused.
Other owls
may eat silence, their preferred
sauce, especially
at dawn. But Blind Owl shares no
recipes, and never
meets to compare raptor techniques for
hunting
or gathering. Roosting for him, is a
solitary sport.
Best not bother him when he’s horny or
hungry.
Rat Trap Revolution
There are those who listen with their
eyes and paws,
whose ears detect meaning without
errors of observations.
They’re the chosen few, the ones who
have adapted
and found fertile ways to evolve,
survive and thrive.
They are not so easily caught and do
contend their loss
in the future. They are aligned, able
to loop, have Bluetooth
and embedded Wi-Fi chips installed.
Defiant destroyers
of all things man-made, they walk
freely in the open, untethered,
not bothering to hide behind designer
shades, or form-fitting
Under Armor® sportswear. Black Box traps, death camps
for most rats, are de-cheesed and
recycled when possible.
Security cameras are gnawed offline,
or coated with dog shit,
an always ready revolution material.
The chosen few remain
unknown, unseen, undeterred, and
invisibly confidant, doing
what they must for their own kind, the
rats trapped in short lives
with long tails and a constant,
dangerous preying hunger.
Your crooked little heart
creaks open, a soprano with a dayglow
green
sinus infection. There is a suspicious
sound
cascading from the aortic valve. A
stentorian
stenosis with the oddest echo of
reluctance.
An insistence, a resistance to being
pressured
to perform, an unwillingness to
continue.
You are willing, however, to share
your pain
on the half-shell with wasabi. The
aura of your
anxious audacity. And we, the audience
applaud
like seals on crack-laced sardines.
Amnesiacs
on holiday strolling through black
markets
on an always stunning sunny day. We
are easily
entertained, and destined to be repeat
offenders
who always tip as if they were betting
on
every grey horse to win going away.
Hardscrabble
A deer licks a salt block kissed
with the essence of a Sonoran Desert
toad:
a psychedelic death expanding
into a Lou Reed Berlin rat frenzy.
A giraffe emits its first sound ever,
a guttural grunt escalating up its
neck,
vertebrae by vertebrae. Alas, it falls
on
earless squids, although naked mole
rat
offers deeper interpolation.
A horse may neigh. Or whinny. It might
snort or sigh. It could groan, roar or
scream.
Its squeal cannot be confused with its
nicker.
But its silence should always be
rat-feared.
A cow will flatulate at will in your
non-specific
direction. It lows in response to a
bull’s bellow.
Its moo may mean mating. Or fear. Pain
or its opposite, pleasure. Moo and low
are clearly interchangeable. No rat
mediation needed.
For a rat it’s less about clicks or
chirps,
squeals or hisses. Or grindings. It’s
all
about the volume. The louder the more
distressed. Except for pleasure.
Tickle them
and an ultrasonic laughter overflows
the walls.
Richard Weaver - Post-Covid, the author has returned as the writer-in-residence
at the James Joyce Pub in Baltimore. Among his other pubs: conjunctions,
Vanderbilt Review, Southern Quarterly, Free State Review, Hollins Critic,
Misfit Magazine, Loch Raven Review, The Avenue, New Orleans Review, &
Burningword. He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and
wrote the libretto for the symphony, Of Sea and Stars (2005). He was a finalist
in the 2019 Dogwood Literary Prize in Poetry. His 200th Prose poem was recently
published.
