The Mice, the Spiders and Man

Country mouse, city mouse, squish the bad thoughts out
Why are you so afraid rodent, the hammer or the hole?

Extinguishment or continuation in a foreign environment

Respiration or cremation, the inevitable cessation  

Time slurping like a spaghetti tail into the maw of the wormhole

The universe eats us all in time as the paws may clutch the hands

Of the clock but scurrying in reverse does nothing to unwind

The cogs like machinating geniuses impervious to fault  

Creeping forward nanosecond by nanosecond fingernails growing

In the digits tallying in a maelstrom of arrangement imparting

Flair and futility in families jostling over end of life financial depleting

Health care problems with hearts, lungs, age, limbs, cells collapsing  

Like Valentines roses left on a sill withered and deposited in the refuse bin

As soon as one wills the acknowledgment of petal from red into black

The green shed of thorns is gripped like a map

For a traveler of life’s grand embellishments of feeling like the puzzle is solved 

To have the Babel tower tumble in bricks of indistinguishable syllables

Puttering about parking lots for adult-children to visit mother at a nursing home

Bringing daffodils and a photo opportunity to snag a second in digital crop

Harvested for the reaping, the sowing, the reaping, the sowing of minutes  

The conversations of bucolic and urban of street corners and fields

Running through the sewers and the corn rows for a meal

Any morsel, a parcel, a tidbit of Earth to step into salvation

In the palms of a turn of chance to perpetuate, to continue the fray  

The mouse and the rat asking directions away from the decay

Sleeping soundly in fur of coddling oblivion like a help mate to cope

With what rodents cannot keep in them, not meant for such thoughts

Simple is the urge, to wrap up in insulation of attics and alleyways  

Apple cores and swine slop, nibbling in spider knots

For a fly in a menu for Renfield to smile at the moon for such blessings

Comings and goings at peace in the loading of one more body

And one more minute sticky and twitching for a maw to devour the sentiment  

Of what it takes for a being to wish to continue to live

Affixed in a web knowing the scent of the spider and yet a man’s fingers extract it

Only to be eaten by the giant in an accumulation of magic

That I may become greater and akin to a beyond if I eat this in remembrance

Of what others abscond from as nonsense