“What the mice are thinking”
The world is filled with beautiful things,
grave and incomprehensible things
that are always busy being bigger than us.
Almost like the others who can bend
their backs and rest in the necks of spoons,
I am lithe, not nearly as the others but almost,
I try; I scamper and we scamper—
we get caught up in the swirling
way of things or at least we try.
The world is a place filled with looming
mysterious clicks of mysterious things—
the light that flashes on and off or the foot
that falls in the back room; we yelp
our war cry, we whip our tails—
we are menacing.
Like the sugar bowl and the pits of tar
where one or two have been caught over time,
I am walking, no, running, scuttling
with eyes closed; there is a sweetness to life
that I am not sure of but also the fear of things
so many times bigger than we can measure.
The world is fair, we are watching it, watching.
Sometimes crumbs fall and we are there to pick them up
and other times we are exhausted by the push of things,
the stop of things, there isn’t time enough; but if we could,
we would unsnap the traps and lift our heads.
