all the mice flood over your lips—

their tailends remembering the touch

of the frosty fingers of the heart's

cold hand reaching out throat-through

as they scuttle past the tongue shaping

its wiggly wares on the palate's potterwheel

with clay of wind and other weightless burdens.

the mice leap onto any available avatar

of embodied momented time—

squiggly strings that squash them to pulp

in their pythongrips, helical accordions

flattening them under their music-shaped

collapsings, and rhizomatic labyrinths

that witchmaze them until they exhaust themselves

gnawing their own flesh in taprooted hunger.

the mouse that leaps from moment

to moment, never nesting in one

for too long, waits at the bottomless

bottom, subsisting on silence, nibbling

on nothingness, but with its ears perked up

for something, for anything, that will

reconnect it to that mouth that warms

with a blossom of words.

~ ajay

6/2/2022