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Sewer Rats
A costume of skin that I hide within.
Peel it away and let the blood wash me clean.
Not the grin of confidence, but forgetfulness.
Erasing the pain by bricking it up in a lower chamber.
Letting the water warp and rats devour it.
At least it is useful to something.
At least it can nurture something.
At least it will be forgotten somehow.
But the rats will find a way out just as they found a way in.
A new place to make a new nest near new food
A place where they will build their new home by chewing a hole through the tender spots
Covering the floor with the discarded hearts, thoughts, memories, regrets, words, places, things, actions, facts, and fictions.
So the young ones won't starve where they are borne
Even though the pain is bricked up and walked away from, it still feeds the hungry who strive to eat to survive a cleansing that the washing of the blood offers.
To wash one clean of a blinding ignorance.
The ignorance that allows one to walk these corridors full of emptiness and not notice the rats that died of starvation upon which the others are feeding.
When the dead are stripped clean of rotten flesh and healthy flesh, the living will feast on their feces.
So even with open eyes there will be nothing to see.
Peel it away and let the blood wash me clean.
Not the grin of confidence, but forgetfulness.
Erasing the pain by bricking it up in a lower chamber.
Letting the water warp and rats devour it.
At least it is useful to something.
At least it can nurture something.
At least it will be forgotten somehow.
But the rats will find a way out just as they found a way in.
A new place to make a new nest near new food
A place where they will build their new home by chewing a hole through the tender spots
Covering the floor with the discarded hearts, thoughts, memories, regrets, words, places, things, actions, facts, and fictions.
So the young ones won't starve where they are borne
Even though the pain is bricked up and walked away from, it still feeds the hungry who strive to eat to survive a cleansing that the washing of the blood offers.
To wash one clean of a blinding ignorance.
The ignorance that allows one to walk these corridors full of emptiness and not notice the rats that died of starvation upon which the others are feeding.
When the dead are stripped clean of rotten flesh and healthy flesh, the living will feast on their feces.
So even with open eyes there will be nothing to see.
Published 10th May 2010
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Anonymous
15th May 2010 00:53am
Appropriately disgusting poem, filled with fantastic images and ideas; the way you express the idea of concealing one's true self beneath "a costume of skin", whilst aware that one day the rats will burst free and conquer all, having fed off the material of one's life, is sublime, horrifically so. An unapologetically grotesque and bleak study of human torment.
