Tiny rats
In bright red pants
Ran up the stairs
And then ran back.What are you not reading
The sleeping man asked
And the rats said
We are not reading
The apocrypha

And we laugh into the dark
For all the nights
we have spent
avoiding that.

He looked at them
And they looked
back at him
Why not read them
then
He asked again.

Or great poets
Like Dante
Or fine minor poets
Say perhaps
Hardy
Or Walter de la mare?
Charles Simic?
St John of the cross?

the rats
were
Tearing newspapers
Into little strips
For the black and white beds

That would cushion their tiny acts
Of rat communion.The man was puzzled
At these facts
And went to bed
And dreamt
Of a day
In which
Tiny blue furballs

Turned into men and women
And decreed with great conviction
That “all rats must read.”And soon, quite soon
Perhaps sooner than soon
The world was electric and dire
And almost entirely dead
With learned rodentsAnd in the few people still alive
Inside that obsidian misery
there was dread
Of a kind no one had ever seenWith great electrical configurations
in the shapes of angels
and furry scholars walking nowhere
with texts for eyes.

Song of the Dead

1

Pain is our science.
Love is our bread.

The light swells inside us.
The light bursts inside us.

We are burning memory.
As memory is burning men.

You are always your death’s head
You cannot see us.

2.

Amiable little men and women
Tumble down as if from heaven
Fall into the western well
With its pale blue, dyspeptic
always eliding
And discriminating

economies of scale

3

Little miseries
R us.
touched
With great chasms
Of dyspepsia
And lust

Oracle

At The Oracle a blue gel of sky
glistened
Like a man o’ war.
litlle figures
With excellent manners
Spoke gibberish
tossing the texts he loved
Into a dark blue fire.

**

Great machines augmented their speeches.
Tiny pistoliers
Made of broken words
Had their way with his tearsAnd the great leaden dragon, wh o would swallow them all
formed them in flame and they did not know

**

Sighing into the mask of his unwritten death
He scrawled the symbols of his gnosis in a secret cave
The walls were red and distant
with their empty glosses and fragmented manifestos.