Currently

I'm sitting at the kitchen table in my Harlem apartment, facing straight ahead, out the dirty window, listening to the squeals and screams of the struggling mouse, stuck to the sticky mouse-trapping-pad we placed underneath the oven. It has already captured one mouse so far, and I should be thinking: wow, how great! This sticky pad stuff really works! This contraption is catching all those evil, dirty, scheming, little mice that have been pooping on our counters and running around the apartment at night--gross! how dare they!--they must be annihilated!...right?

I'm sitting at the kitchen table in my Harlem apartment, facing straight ahead, out the dirty window, tears streaming down my face. Trying not to hear the squealing and screaming mouse, slowly dying on the poison-infused sticky pad behind me. Maybe if I continue to stare out this window I'll forget that it is there; maybe if I turn my music up a bit louder I won't hear the squeals, which I realize are now diminishing to faint yelps; as if he's calling to me! As if he knows that death is a soft spot for me now, and that even thinking about another creature losing the breath of life, makes me want to double over in sorrow. My tears are growing into a fit of crying.

I now hear only soft screams from the mouse; as if he is beginning to realize that this is a battle he will lose. As if he is taking these last moments to review his mouse-life: his mouse-children, his mouse-wife. Must I sit hear and endure this? If I change rooms, he will still be here, stuck to the sticky, mouse-trapping-pad. Any attempt to remove him from the sticky, mouse-trapping-pad would be futile...nor would I want to attempt an interference with death. My crying has turned to weeping.

Now all I hear is panting--tiny inhalations and tiny exhalations from his tiny, fragile lungs ..then silence. I turn off my music. I stop crying, and I turn around from the window.

Who I'm Writing For...

For those lost,
The tempest tossed.
For those without,
With prevailing doubt.

The disrupted and disjointed ones,
With little air left in their lungs,
We must breathe in and breathe again,
And carry the pace of the race we're all in.

Though flowers must always bloom and leaves wilt and fall,
And the seasons must always change like the seasons of us all,
The life of so precious a man, a man such as he
Was never, I submit, intended not to be.

I wonder if it's crowded there, beyond what I can see,
With other spirits attending their own and watching patiently.
I know you can read this, I hear you mocking my faults still,
In a lovingly nagging way, though, intending no harm or ill.

But I can think of nothing more to do to communicate my pain,
Than to immortalize you in my words so there you will remain.
You have followed me to school and stood next to me each day,
And I'm writing this for you, dear heart, to ease your loss some way.