House of Rats
They're up there, all right,
in the roof playing scrabble, listening to
scratchy old Fats Waller records.
They started out as a gang of
desperadoes
escaped from a laboratory,
arrived via a garbage truck
up overhanging tree branches
elbowed their way in & soon
the
colony is an empire of rats
who eat the insulation batts
chew wires,
through the ceiling
to ransack the kitchen
take bites out of everything
&
carry off furniture. I can hear them
scurrying with bits & pieces,
hammering & sawing:
they're building houses - a model rat town - with
imitation
garages to park stolen toy cars in.
After munching down another box of
double strength poison
the rats are back at work with a vengeance, thump
around
the rafters insulating the house with rat shit.
Or hard at love writhing,
squealing
like sick starlings or kicked puppies. The weaker explode
and
TV screens fill with rats' blood but there's
more where they came from.
Teeming over
mountains, down valleys, jamming highways, falling
off bridges to
scurry ashore up storm water drains.
Exterminators arrive dressed as
astronauts and poison
the house for ten thousand years. It's time to move
out.
But the rats have laid eggs in your pockets, stow
away, follow you
from house to house.
The curse enters its exponential phase.
Tentacles
unwind from the ceiling, dirty great moths
and leopard slugs take over your
happy home.
Soon you are a trellis. That's just what the rats say.
I'm
down here listening to radio messages,
oiling automatic weapons, building
rockets.
Living in a rat's belly.
