The Mouse with Cat's Eyes ...

Your emotions trade like currency,

spreading through colleagues' faces.

     Your language plays like math

inside my clear, rational head:

I'll hear the doctors insult me—

“Sick-soul” is the meaning of psychopath—

but their words won't hurt. How is that

“sick”? And not “powerful” instead?

                                                                               * 

I was born in a world of bias,

with dictionaries written

     by people who twitched in recoil

at “Corpse”—the mere word—and

Grinned dumbly, glazed-eyed,

at “Kitten.” Simple to foil

such heart-felt minds, when cool flesh

and warm purrs feel equal in my hand.

                                                                                             *

You call mine “sick,” for it's more than yours.

Your motive shows; your guilty will.

     You justified that gorilla in our zoo

by telling your children “This welded hole—

fake wild—is better than the chaos in

Africa; it's kindness.” But I see through:

The gorilla loses, despite power-in-arms,

for his disposition to accept, and not control.

                                                                                         *

You also accept too much, your nostalgic eyes

Gluing small-town names on a steel high-rise.

     You'll cash in others' feelings even if they break

your senses; that's how little pages of lies,

still photos of wet eyelids, brief shouts of despair

crumble strong knees and pull genius souls to take

their own, willing lives. Your strength for nothing, when

feelings paralyze limbs while an unfeeling fire rages.

                                                                                   *

So I am, in flesh, a human being.

Same in geography, same in strength,

     same in size.

But where most were born with a guilt-cluttered soul,

I'm a god beyond that preying nest;

a mouse with cat's eyes.