mites sprouted from his fur settled for feasting life's interstice their witching hour i left him dead a night waited for the infestation's dissolve don't worry this isn't a poem about weeping for my pet rat or carrying his miniature corpse to compost outside (in the muck i'm pretty sure isn't composting literal dogshit) it's not about the backyard hoppers those tumble- kids blowing through our streets whose parents let them in the house nights who gawk at their friendly neighborhood poet disposing another body no this poem's about my dog trying to define absence in his peanutbutter brain staring at the tiny tank like a toy's gone missing instead of a creature
or is that too sentimental what's one rat decomposing in memory's knotty fray (a rope i've hung from too many rafters) this too i'll forget before sundown though there might be rats in the afterlife i doubt mine will be heaven forbid some things die forever like memory forgets its maker or a single piano note erodes the ear i'm not
convinced autumn hunts summer's ass like a dog in heat chill breeze just summer remade reshaped shrieking kids become ancestors of another brood across the street a 55-and-over complex the smoke of their cigarettes i inhale the dust of others' bodies every day seems like nothing wants to stay dead play dead maybe that's what i want to be buried alive and dig myself out dirt caked to my fingernails impossible stories to tell i fought off a lion from inside its stomach i tightroped a railroad to Baltimore naked these go over better at dinner parties than parasites & fungi than my head rotten with worms or the opossum that steals my rat's body because i don't have energy to turn the muck again (i followed into the night i heard it feast on my dead) but i already told you this is not a poem about me or the rat it's about my dog the way his nose leaves prints on the door glass when he begs to come inside