The Rat King
Free Verse Prose by Reagan James
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There's an old tin coffee mug wound tightly around his fingers He's pondering his next move Scheming and plotting while the sun is yawning It's his fourth cup and there's another on the drip Drip drip drip the ideas pour He would have to be careful No one could know what he was up to except for the rats of course They always lug their weight through the brainstorm And boy are they punctual Crawling through the miniature handcrafted reclaimed koa door he had fashioned It's a nicely fitted back entrance to his cardboard laboratory Emitting smells of rotten eggshells like a freshly fed crematorium Obviously, they can't be seen using the front steps
People might start to ask questions Would you look at that it's nine already The meeting begins when they have a quorum Just don't try to explain to these guys the rules of decorum And the role is called Wally Whiskers well he's more of a weasel than a rat But leave him out and they'd be grasping at eels So they let it slide Charlie Chaff-eyes he's got what you need when it comes to wires and sprockets and machines that need oil But don't forget for a second about the legend of Billy Boil He burned a cat alive and probably would have done some time if he had a social security number Then there's Jumpin Jimmy Falls They say he took a dive off Niagra over some outstanding debt But when you do business with rats you get what you get One by one he read their names Larry Loose-Change Ricky Rust Sandy Salmonella Terry Two-Time Tommy Tuberculosis Yanny Yellow-Belly Peter Pimples-Eater Willy Whiplash And Bobby the Back-Brace And on and on he went We will never quite know what was discussed Though I wager there were some dangerous notions spoken Talks of shrunken heads and poison potions We can speculate but we know what happened Always on time and dressed in season Fear hit every network in the cycle Jack Bauer couldn’t have done more with twenty-four After it all went down Like a rotten banana, they split the check Peeling out single file through the trash palace door Instructed to never see, speak, or meet again This was the final fellowship of the rat collective But what became of the old man Sitting at home drumming his tin can Was he there while we rationed our food Where was he for all those moonlight curfews Did he have access to a clean water supply While we devoured our young Was he smoking a pipe Was he eating and drinking and singing And placing bets on how long the rest would survive No power, no towers, and no shelter in sight He started a drought and we neglected the garden Rationality dies one cell at a time The smallest seeds grow the greatest wars Like baby saplings watered and nursed in the mind I hear he’s still out there somewhere Rocking back and forth in his chair The King of the rats in the land of the blind
Reagan James is a writer, actor, musician, and software engineer living in Austin, Texas. He finds himself inspired by odd, abstract, and absurd things and does his best to try to capture the mania in his head in various mediums. To view more of his work visit fibononascii.medium.com