Poetry by Leopold McGinnis

Modern Art Gone are the days Of artists and easel Amongst treetops and seagulls These artists hide in caves Spilling abstractions From paint cans Using photographs For models Of a world they’ll Never see. Revenge of the Mouse He watched a mouse die on the busy sidewalk corner of a skyscraper downtown Heaving, staring up at him with eyes as black as space breathing slower and slower - some sort of respiratory problem - easing into the pavement until… the spark was gone And he thought he’d kill himself if death wasn’t even more pathetic and insignificant than life - he thought, if he could grow to a thousand feet tall he’d trample this city and all its ugly people underfoot Take a dump on its national monuments Piss in the water and crush the earth between his fingers like clay, Laugh! Laugh! Then he’d blast off into the furthest reaches of space Finding brave new civilizations and extinguishing them one by one, The greens ones, the red ones, the purple ones before gathering up the debris to make a gun the weight of fifty black holes dense enough, powerful enough big enough to wipe out the universe in one single shot And then he’d bite down on the metal muzzle pull back the trigger and spray his grey-matter across the dark-matter leave a universe of colored memories rotting in the vacuum of nothingness the red ones, the green ones the monuments and the mouse.