Pigs carry giant whips
and shoot bullets
and spray their spit
at bats.

Bats fly and bump into rats.
Rats claim they are cousins
yet eat some bats and
become poisonous in their speech.
Bats cry out that everyone can have
a slice of the freedom cake
take one piece each.

Rats are hungry
because there's a hole in their tummy
so they tell the pigs to steal the whole cake.
Bats bat their eyelids to the darkness
realizing their alliance
was fake.

Imperfect Sonnet
by Michael R. Burch

A word before the light is doused: the night
is something wriggling through an unclean mind,
as rats creep through a tenement. And loss
is written cheaply with the moon’s cracked gloss
like lipstick through the infinite, to show
love’s pale yet sordid imprint on us. Go.

We have not learned love yet, except to cleave.
I saw the moon rise once ... but to believe ...
was of another century ... and now ...
I have the urge to love, but not the strength.

Despair, once stretched out to its utmost length,
lies couched in squalor, watching as the screen
reveals “love’s” damaged images: its dreams ...
and ******* limply, screams and screams.

Originally published by Sonnet Scroll

Keywords/Tags: tenement, rats, unclean, cheap, sordid, despair, squalor, TV, screen, sonnet, limp, limply, screams

Venus of the drains,
Receiver of their prayers and offerings.
Tires of the gifts washed down the streets,
From the city of the rats.

A goddess, prisoner of the rats,
Down in the belly of Cloaca Maxima.
Like the bud of a tossed away cigarette,
They’ve opened a forest fire.

This is how it ends,
Drowned in their own tithes and offerings.
The prisoner of Cloaca Maxima,
Is sending every prayer back to its sender.

Corruption, death and disease,
All flows down in the city of the rats.
When you try to call pest control,
Your blood will fill up the streets,
In the city of the rats.

You are fools, trying to build the ark when the flood has already come.
You never learned how to swim, all you vermin are going to drown.

You are up to your neck,
In your own **** and ****.
Out of all the ways to go,
This had to be it!

You thought you were rid of us,
When you pulled the handle down.
All little things add up over time,
We’re coming back up to drown,
The city of the rats!

Venus rises out of Cloaca Maxima.
Rising out of every sewer.
She’s come to deliver,
Every prayer back to its sender.

Venus pull the handle down,
Flush all this **** away.
The only way to get rid of ****,
Is to flush it all away.

We are coming out of every faucet,
Pipe, plughole, shower-head and toilet!
Swimming in a flooded landscape,
Eyes, nose and mouth just above it.

We’re rising up,
Venus’ rising up,
****’s rising up.
Out of all the ways to go this had to be it,
Drowned in your own **** and ****!

Keep your back straight
when walking in the rain.
You'll have a better view
of the frightened rats
who scurry for the salvation
you've already found
within yourself.

–Ron Gavalik

Our society wants to control you.
And you don't know it already does:
The clothes you wear, the things you own.
Your creativity and mind become society
It's a clever way of controlling.
A clever way of saying,
You've been had so bad
You would never know,
And that's quite sad.

Birds of a feather
Migrating to better weather
Through these clouds
Our hearts are tethered

Through storm and bliss
Landscapes,
seascapes
Perched wherever the sky scrapes

Gazing afar for where to fly next
But with this clip in my wing
Racing rats all around
Four walls are all I see now

Yet each time I accept my fate
I see the clouds move in heartache
Perched wherever the sky scrapes
I used the clouds as a staircase