Noises In The Walls

Noises in the Walls Life always finds a niche somehow. This house is not a very new one. The rats have found their way. The walls Are rumbling with their moving in. We are so like them, head to foot, Our noses pointing forward, eyes Adapted to the darkened world We have discovered or invented And occupied, eating our way Through indigestible barriers, Teeth aching with our suffering, Awake all night scrounging for snacks. They are predictable, some ways: They can be tempted by some things To carry poison in their blood, To be the sacrifice that kills As many as partake of it, Sending them out of this life To be transformed, changed utterly Beyond the forms of limitation, The spinning wheels and springs and traps Of steely death and rich desire. They have their paths set out for them By practice kneading evolution To fit the molds that lead them to The ovens—they are bread themselves To be incinerated. They fill trains With filth and desperation, fear And what comes after fear gives up. And in the meantime, sex is all That really matters: call it love If you prefer, but even friendship Is just the way statistics rule The prisoner’s dilemma, honor With which we stamp our highest aims Being the ash of how betrayal Will always seem quite sensible To one, but will not save the wager Against the cosmos to survive Beyond ourselves, made by our codes. They find their way to our bookcases, And even when we don’t take down Some volume of the things that pass For wisdom in this age, we find

A stink of rot, for one has fallen Where none can help him, off the cliff That the designer’s accident Prepared for the assuming ones Who took their next step forward here Instead of somewhere else, by chance. We want to clean it out, suck up remains And seal this little catacomb, That we, forgetting, not be bothered By what our noses sense ahead For all of us, that helpless fall And pointless struggle to climb back To where we were when things went wrong, Racing in circles ever smaller Until we fall exhausted on The pile of our decayed forbears, Scratching the walls in helplessness. And now there is a pile of dust And crumbling bones, sometimes refreshed By one who dessicates, alone And long forgotten by the living, Just one new circumstantial victim Of this, their murdering world, our home.