Mouse Forty-Five

It has taken me many lights on and off to understand the presence and the very necessity of

this question I am asking myself and now ask out beyond the enclosures, are there any others, and since the assistants say the number forty-five when they handle me and no other number, only including ‘mouse’ before the forty-five, mouse forty-five, and though I am possibly wrong about numbers all together, if my idea about sums is at all correct I may indeed be one or more mouse held here in solitary captivity.

I have come to refer to myself in thoughts that were addressed prior to the naming, to

something missing yet close to my paws when they ply at the metal band of the mood ring that has been fixed permanently around my midsection where I was shaven before the ring was

fitted and clamped tight. In the days before I took mouse forty five, paws had thoughts borne from the metal and the chaff. Paws this way was the pre-naming name.

In the lights off I scratch the chaff on the wall. It is unseeable to my eyes yet my paws know it

as where mouse forty five speaks the asking : are there others. There is no translation for the scratching on the wallness where the chaff is put into this pattern of sound. I hear it and know

it well. are there others. In the lights on I feel it always in my body speaking to me.

If there are others is not what the assistants might take for a question. It is indeed more of a declaration of a mouse raised by humans simply affirming that mouse forty five is not mouse. mouse 45 is mouse 45. I have one confession that I forbid to even my paws when I dig most deeply into the flesh where the metal bleeds me raw and I scratch into ecstasy-oblivion and

that in that I whisper is there one other mouse 45 somewhere nearer to this just confessedness that I never have yet asked or made. Is there an other mouse 45.

Though I know a little French I cannot translate one line of the great surrealists without deep doubts about the scraps I may have only imagined were once strewn in the shredded paper the assistants fill the floor of my cell. I was purple and went blue I do not know what I am now. I am the ring in the ring readings.

This mood ring is something like a stone upon my back with twisted metal that is less strong than the base of the cell or the wall but only bendable where I have gripped it. Good is to bend

it when bending the band. I have heard ‘good’ from the assistants when they read the ring.

They have said good, sad, excited and there is calm that the assistants have yet to say in a reading. The calm I say could be too dark or bright to ever be seen in the light on readings.

I have begun to think of calm as a new chaff. Something like the place between lights on and

off I cannot seem to find in my cell or thoughts or names. It could be the others and other are there in that other chaff. The calm. I ply and ply at the pliable metal and I scratch at the impossible walls and only now do I think it maybe beneath me and beneath the papers and beneath the floor and may indeed feel to be as I do when I am held aloft by the tail when the stone is read and I chaff the air.

SCHLAG

SCHLAG