"There are rats jumping in my stomach."

Hunger sets
Like jumping rats
Ricocheting off stomach walls
In some indigenous Africa.

I'd like to be
Scurrying hairless tail whips
In your intestinal cage.

I've practiced tip-tapping
In non-air-conditioned stairwells
Because I know you're warm.

I've burrowed
Tunnels in the dirt
Like replicate digestive tubing.

Dreamt of
Bowel-bouncing rodent claws
Sinking into fleshy ducts,
Meandering me far along tracts,
But I can always find the center
Of your pulsating hot spot.

But what really happened is
I put my Moses
In a basket.

Sent him
Down the river
With a poem
And a curable
Disease
To find
His pharaoh.

It took a week
For the waves
To empy out
His last echoes,
Turning me all
Basket case skull,
Brain weave
Brain waves.

Today,
I bathe
In the Nile.