Watching the municipal verge-trimmer wreak its devastation
Beneath the roof tiles, in the dark
of dust and chitin-sharded debris,
dig and chew a regiment of mice.
In the dusty dark of ever-moonless nights,
the scrabble-scratch scrapes its frantic tune
and draws down the owls
from their silent star-specked flight,
to snatch up wanderers, pit-pattering among the litchened moon-dapples.
The roof-world is soft silence
and the sharp of teeth, claw and shrill-voiced things.
Life and death round as apples.
We dig, delve, suck the earth-blood
with mechanical mouths,
tear the guts and stuff the shredded sinews
into plastics to last ten thousand years,
our monument to lifeless death,
shiny as brash, crass as cash,
and in a hollow of this small encircled wood,
the god of rottenness and regeneration hides
with empty trembling hands,
forgotten in the antiseptic plastosphere.
The rodent-nibbled moon sinks unnoticed,
ethereal silver, swallowed up
by our up-flung excreted glitter.
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