Mest leste ▸
Edgar Lee Masters
If a man could bite the giant hand
That catches and destroys him,
As I was bitten by a rat
While demonstrating my patent trap,
In my hardware store that day.
But a man can never avenge himself
On the monstrous ogre Life.
You enter the room—that’s being born;
And then you must live—work out your soul,
Aha! the bait that you crave is in view:
A woman with money you want to marry,
Prestige, place, or power in the world.
But there’s work to do and things to conquer—
Oh, yes! the wires that screen the bait.
At last you get in—but you hear a step:
The ogre, Life, comes into the room,
O rat
the plate sat empty
full of air alone
the little prince this day
proclaimed a war
measure me for a black suit
full of yesterday’s pleasure
I shall do business with loss and war
till my eyes begin to fail
and I begin to take a rat
home to supper
I give a groat for a pot
and shit in it,
waiting for the moon.
After dinner come several lush lutes.
While we were at play, my wife went to hunt,
and brought her bow here
to the hole of a fleet rat
at the bottom of a bed.
before four o’clock
a rat walked in the tallow
as soft as it
The upstairs neighbors keep to themselves.
Who wouldn’t? It’s a rough neighborhood.
Gang members are so brazen
they’ve taken to wearing police uniforms.
I sublet a basement from the rats
& commute to work on an exercise wheel.
The shower smells a bit like sulphur,
but the hot water always comes on right away.
I pass people on the street
with faces like crushed cigarette butts,
but I’m sure they’re perfectly nice
once you get to know them.
I hear things, sure—
some kind of BDSM party, I guess,
or an amusement park
with too many scary rides.
You lady’s purses, you tack-toed
wallops of white silk, you grim grins,
I have you on my string as good
as legal tender for my room & board
at any inn, my dog & I
welcome there only so long
as you are not, my beauties—
& so we’re tied together in a way.
This broad-brimmed hat wards off
two kinds of yellow, sun & scorn.
How dare we subsist on the hard-
won crumbs of brutes!
But the trap is a good teacher.
Somewhere you must have
your own canny king, making free
with all the best morsels of dark
A rat is running around in my walls,
I could hear his footsteps quick but heavy leaving a trial of misfortune and commotion, how did he end up in there I ask myself
Who let him into my walls
Is there a hole I do not know about?
He gives away his spot and runs down to next open space he can get to before I find him,
Leave I tell him and he does not understand
Well of course he doesn't, he's a rat
I try to reel him out with some cheese and nuts
Although those do not satisfy him as much as my thoughts,
Please go Mr. Rat I have suffered enough, your running is causing me a headache,
My walls are weak and thin
Maybe that's why you have ventured in
It was an easy spot to lay and you stayed
He was a college man.
But he needed a job.
So he went to work,
Working as an order filler,
In a wholesale supply house.
They gave him a sheet of paper.
It had numbers on it.
They gave him a cart with shelves.
They said, go through the warehouse,
and pull these tools from the bins.
And put them on the cart in order.
So this loyal conscientious college man,
Began to pull tools from the bins.
And he put them on his cart.
When he came to a bin marked S. Y. 1300,
He reached in and grasped something.
Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.
I was attorney for the “Q”
And the Indemnity Company which insured
The owners of the mine.
I pulled the wires with judge and jury,
And the upper courts, to beat the claims
Of the crippled, the widow and orphan,
And made a fortune thereat.
The bar association sang my praises
In a high-flown resolution.
And the floral tributes were many—
But the rats devoured my heart
And a snake made a nest in my skull