Mousehole

Mousehole

I scream in the night

for the rescuers

but there are no sirens, no

flashing lights traveling

a moonscape of ash.

I lie down on the floor

open my mouth

pretend I'm a mousehole

so something

will come and live with me here.

Something closer than skin

warmer than frost at

heart dead void; it can be small

even as small as a sin

creeping in.

A warm twitch-nosed mouse

or even an unquiet imp

would be company enough;

dogs only sleep

and I let them lie.

~December 2012

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Challenge: Fireblossom's Wednesday Friday

The illustrious Catblossom has delegated this prompt to her accomplished acolyte Fireblossom, who asks that we write about disaster and cataclysm, or something. This is probably 'or something.'

Image: Mouse, by Barnaby Kerr Photography, on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons license    

Rats

Rats

I dreamed the big storm

finally came.

The crippled tree

came through the roof.

It wasn’t bad;

it let out  all the rats,

scrambling up the

streaming branch to blow

in the screaming whirlwind.

All but the

tiniest heartheld 

within

who raised his

demon’s white snout

for an eyeblink,

then went back 

to chewing.

January 2011

55 rats plus one for the G-Man

The Rat Wars of 2084

The Rat Wars of 2084

for the ratling

It started simply

when the food ran out.

It became a lifetest for

meat between the small rats

and the bigger rats.

The talking rats attempted to

convince the others they could eat words.

This was clever, but

unsuccessful.

Then things began

to escalate.

Bombs and air raids

made the night sky uneasy

as a pudding in an earthquake.

Bodies decorated the street in streamers

hanging red tinsel from the bending lights

dark blood came down like rain

blood enough to drown in

to float the enterobacterial rodships of every plague

ever seen on a globe of filth and plague.

Anthropophaginian shapes scrabbled for hiding,

dissolved in the shadows of ruin

gnawing on last year's bones, drinking vintage sewage

welling from craters in crazystone runways.

Exterminate the plague bearers,

came the panic cry on the black wind, exterminate

before it’s too late!

But the humans are much

much tougher 

than they look.

October 2011

 Straying from the gothic to the post apocalyptic, but clinging still, hopefully, to the October miasma for your Halloween pleasure.

To see the image I originally had reproduced here to illustrate this poem, follow this link to  Untitled Work by ZDZISŁAW BEKSIŃSKI to a copyrighted site where his entire opus is on view. It's worth it.

Beksinski's bio on wikipedia

The Garden Rat

The Garden Rat

Under an arc of liquid ice,

streaking the window behind,

clashing on the canna leaves,

runs a black stripe of being

fast and blurry as

a faint memory passing and lost

in the midst of children’s calling clamor.

It’s the mysterious

Garden Rat.

Every day I don’t see it

move, it’s just passed me,

disappearing behind the trunks

of the crape myrtle, secret

but

disturbing.

I hunch myself defensively

when I reach to pull a weed.

It’s undefined, yes,

but it’s huge.

(For a rat)

I’m sure it has teeth

bigger than these spider eggs

I’m brushing off my glove,

and sharper than

old quarrels.

All summer I worried

and tried to avoid

The Garden Rat,

dark and diseased,

and hiding in the soft shed petals

of the black-eyed susan and

the weeds I was now

afraid to pull.

Then fall came, and the leaves fell.

The cannas crumbled to the ground.

I went one day to rake the remains,

and from behind the mummy of stalks

flashed the mysterious

black and rapid

Neighbor’s Cat;

The Garden Rat.

Pandora’s Cat.

November 2010

Posted for Jingle's Thursday Poet's Rally, Week #32

Image from npr.org  Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images