Of Mice & Rats

Selamat Datang! Kuala Lumpur says
and the city welcomes me with crows.
They are black birds.
I like to think of them as crows.
They remind me of something as primal as death
as they queue on the telephone lines at Pasar Seni.

Crows eat everything including carcass
of rice-field rats. This I’ve seen
from the village where I was born.

You said a mouse bit your toe
while you are in India in one of its strange
cities whose name I can’t recall.
You said you don’t know what to do with the mouse
and I wished you were a crow
so you could eat the mouse.

Did you know, my cousin learned to feed house mice?
She owes her wisdom from our gone Lola:
“Feed the mouse so they don’t bite you.
And talk to them too.”
Now, my cousin works abroad.
She said the city she’s in is so clean.
She’s been there for a year and she has not seen
a mouse except Ratatoulie and Mickey Mouse.
She cannot feed the television or the stuffed toy.

At home, in the Philippines, and in India
where you are now, mice and rats creep everywhere.
Perhaps because they're more powerful
than stuffed Mickey Mouse who wants to purge them.

I’d like to think that there are still mice
in Kuala Lumpur so I thought of those birds as crows.
Crows, I told you, remind me of death.
While mouse and rats may remind me of life
- the life un-purged by the insanity of sanitation
of televisions and Mickey Mouse.

- Dumay

I am Dumay from the Cordilleras (mountain) region of the Northern Philippines. 

I write poems everyday so I could survive, so I could tell myself that I am living.

I write about the Cordilleras and beyond. I was born and raised here and I have no problem in dying here. The mountains is my source of inspiration. She is my muse.