of nothing in particular

spiderweb

i keep catching rodents in buckets
though i'm not trying to catch any at all
and each time it feels quite devastating
thinking about how i let it happen
i never really mind them, not truly
even though they often take things from me
so is life; they must survive just as i
and when i see the mess they've made
and my ravaged seeds and coconut grass
i could never wish any harm upon them
for they know no better than that
and when i see them caught in my dad's traps
i pity the lost creature just seeking comfort
and warmth away from the snowstorms
but then i walk out one night to my shed
and see two voles curled at the bottom
one on its side and the other belly up
while i had no idea how they managed
to climb all the way up the smooth sides
in the middle of a barren floor
or what they had thought they might find
i thought instead about how long they starved
if they had seen each other alive at one point
or if the other fell in after the first was cold
what they had done in the mania of hunger
if they knew that they were going to die
another time one lay in the middle of the floor
unharmed physically but lifeless nonetheless
and i had to sweep it up into a dustpan
and wonder how it came to be there
and how i came to be the one to sweep it up
i saw a mouse drowned once, the worst of all
in a bucket of bleach i neglected for months
its small beady eyes stared up at me
peaking past the surface with terror
i almost screamed at its stiff, floating form
and in my mind i saw it thrashing wildly
desperately splashing about in the acid fluid
and i wonder how long it took for it to die
and if it felt its insides burn as the bleach
leaked into its eyes and nose and ears and mouth
but most of all I wondered if it made me cruel
if my continual carelessness that killed
again and again made me a cruel person
or maybe, perhaps worse, a stupid person
who made the same choices and mistakes
that hurt others who were too stupid themselves
to see the web i spun