I'm Not Dead Yet (But I Bet You'll Wish You Were, After Reading This!)

I have various things to say--things like "There was a seagull out by the dustbins this morning, pecking his own feet," and "Yesterday's visit to Saint Paul's revealed that I had somehow contrived to lose a pound since my initial appointment;" also "The soundtrack for We Love Katamari is horrible and sublime, by turns."

I have various things to say, but exhaustion is a) robbing me of coherence, and b) making my head flop about on my shoulders in a rather silly way. I can't say them to my satisfaction tonight. I'll settle for this:

This is my disgusting rat parts pile. Don't take any rat parts. They are mine. They are all mine. I'm not sharing with anyone.

Sometimes, when the moon's in the sky and nobody else is looking, I come up here and roll around in my rat parts. I dive in headfirst, like a cormorant plunging into the sea, and wriggle my great long-toed feet till every crevice and cranny is full of ratguts. I mean, the spaces between my toes, under my fingernails, behind my ears--just everywhere. I writhe and writhe till I'm ONE with the ratguts, sort of thing. And then I rise, a dripping rat-slurry revenant, to face the world.

DEAD RAT DOUBLE-DACTYL

Glistery guttery
Rattus Norvegicus
Let us eviscerate
Every last one!

Butcher them, knacker them;
Mount them and lacquer them!
Rat-appendectomy--
Isn't it fun?

HAIKU FOR A PILE OF SMELLY RATGUTS

SPRING

Gutflowers a-blooming;
the rancid breath of April.
I think I'm in love.

SUMMER

Apollo's delights:
the savour of sunflower seeds;
the ripe scent of rat.

AUTUMN

Forgotten leaves rot
consigned to well-tramped gutters;
putrid rats beneath.

WINTER

Stiff and bedraggled
winter-ravaged rat insides.
Why did you leave me?

That's right. It's a bunch of poems about ratguts. I didn't even write them specifically for this occasion. It's just that I've promised to update my journal more often, even when I'm under the weather, so folks won't think I've died. (This is my version of that one Monty Python bit, the one with the Black Death, and the corpse-carts, and that bloke popping up: "I'm not dead!")