trapped like rats

every electric keyboard whine can be sublime
when mice eat cheese all night from silver dishes that
      tickle their whiskers
and the rats will cringe from where they wait in the wings
with their hairy tails in traps,
           “oh the tales we could tell, cos you see,
      we used to get the cheese
back when the wurlitzer hum made the basement floor and
walls samba like a six-point-five somewhere along the
san andreas, bigger at the epicentre, yes,
      don’t you see now…”
           yes, see now –
when your life story consists of bottomless lattes
           (oh heaven)
and the hours you waste thinking on the years
you wasted getting the education you’ll never use and for which
you didn’t save the receipt so there’s no return,
      no refund or exchange;
all those little lives are gone like the will of mice
in traps when the top half of the cage
clangs down on the bottom and all that cheese just
rots in their stomachs like acid and they’d
      rather be the rat –
“at least for him it’s over fast and the cheese doesn’t go bad”
(they would rather die with
a nice taste in their mouths) –
you see now you have to ignore the background noise
and find a way to eat at the expense of
      either freedom or freedom to live, no matter
            how whiny the electric noise gets,
            how hauntingly the wurlitzer hums.