When rats drop off a sinking ship
They don’t think, “This ship is sinking!”
That thought would require an Einstein
Of what passes for rat thinking.
By then, they’re all around the bend,
Dumbstruck or homicidal;
They’d follow each other over a cliff,
Like those Gadarene swine in the Bible.
When the flood first showed its foaming tongue,
Those rats thought, “Well, okay!
This little flood is bound to wash
Some little fancy trash our way.”
But as the flood got serious
And approached the waterline,
And available space got precious,
And the air got a little fine,
One rat after another rat,
As the lightbulbs shorted blue,
Started to veer and savage,
Doing like the big rats do,
Tearing morsels from the lips of rat infants,
Killing pregnant mama rats for kicks,
And the rats that hadn’t run crazy yet
Were in what you could call a fix.
Their red eyes swivelled, shot with The Fear,
But the fear just made them slow;
They clambered up the metal ladders
Toward the noplace their was to go,
Because now the flood was flicking toward
The bottom of the main deck slats,
And you couldn’t tell the flood of the flood
From the blood of the flood of rats.
So it’s only the few, worst rats survive,
While the meek take their final dip.
Just the worst rats left to save themselves
On another sinking ship.
