[New-Poetry] rodent poems sought

[Skip Fox]

This is not a poem but a short-short. (An editor once labeled a couple of my
small stories "Flasher Fiction.") It's not about rats, but a couple mice. An
almost mid-summer night's entertainment:


Itching of the Phantom Foreskin

Once there was a country mouse and a city mouse and the country mouse, who
was his cousin, went to live with the city mouse . . . who knows why, . . .
really?  Was it drought?  Did the farm blow away?  Or was he bored with all
his hick buddies talking about how they were going to "blow this town one
day"?  When he set down his suitcase and told his cousin, the city mouse,
that he had come to live with him, the city mouse leapt upon him, held him
down, tore off his head with his teeth, and took a dump down the pie-hole's
sceptic pipe we call a throat, partially for the gratuitous violence but
also because the country mouse needed it done (pan-struck face, smarmy
hairlip, obsequious drivel).  The city mouse kept the corpse of what had
been his cousin out in the alley where he and his friends could join to
their merriment of skies, of cans, of blasted brick, the example of how a
decapitated country mouse, some festering of the primitive, looks, and
smells, and moves, how his red plaid shirt browns from the various
chemistries, the beautiful fluffiness of a corpse, deflated the third
morning with a whoosh and no shortage of joyeusete, comparing its bouquet to
flatulence, someone's wife's breath, or feet, etc. 
	Thus might end our story were it not the "absolute is the dimension
of a thing prospectively" "now that the relative has been restored as that
which includes the absolute" (Olson), which brings us back to the rotting
corpse and one of the city mouse's buddies who--after long afternoons of
coffee and evenings of drinking, cigarettes, talking of little Minnies tight
as squeegees (how they barked! gravel titties), of a city's necessary
luxuries, and of leaving one day--would return in the latest of the earliest
hours, after all the others had gone home to their loathsome holes and
cabinets, he would sneak back to the alley's hymnal vault, to the corner
behind the dumpster, beneath a slice of constellations (shield of Perseus),
to stand above the ripening joke, breathing in its ripening stew . . . to
think, masturbate, and pray.