[New-Poetry] rodent poems sought

[Anny Ballardini]

this is a rat's poem, no doubt about it. I think that Skip Fox can reach 
something similar to the bottom, when he wants. Please note that I mean it 
as a positive remark, very few know how to get out all the stench.


From: "Skip Fox" <skip at louisiana.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 7:50 PM


> 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.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> New-Poetry mailing list
> New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
>
>
> -- 
> No virus found in this incoming message.
> Checked by AVG.
> Version: 7.5.524 / Virus Database: 270.2.0/1495 - Release Date: 6/10/2008 
> 5:11 PM
>
>