I like to imagine mice in the corners of my house. Creaks or the minute thrumming of electrical chords secrete feet and tiny nails and a damp pink nose. Tails accidentally paint whole invisible sagas in traces across the walls. Baseboard tapestries. They listen to my CD's while I'm asleep. The CD's are the easiest for them to carry, with a small nose hole and the fact they can balance nicely across their backs. But they team up to put on my records, or sometimes one will wrestle a cassette out of its box and hang from the top of the stereo to kick the tape deck shut. They build things while the music plays. They build tiny cities and they organize DVD cases by favourite colour and they tower into living sculptures to reach a box on a shelf or a curled-up spire warming itself on the lava lamp. They cook. Snacks and cakes like you wouldn't believe and a scale brewery where the hops come only from a cruelty-free farm in the left wall of the living room. (You'd be surprised what goes on in most hops cultivation sites.) They hide a morsel in the curtains or under the sofa for when a sunbeam moves slightly in the afternoon to cloak its rescue.
As I sleep, the orchestra of the sounds that might be, now definitely are, crackling and waltzing and playing in every familiar or tiny or useless or un-thought-of space in the house, lulls me. Words spring from silences that leak between them from another universe, from a planet or a galaxy without any transparency of mice. Poems grow and spread into waking breaths.
Take a few.
Take dozens.
They may haunt and prosper. They will appear in new dents in the toaster or wear marks on the door or a static in loose wire, when you forget. They will massage your diaphragm to lure it into deep, even breaths. You needn't remember them. But, if you do, when you do, they will proliferate unseen, distant constellations into your dreams.
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