Striding down a Chicago sidewalk,
under the El,
I came across a croaked rat,
splayed out on its back
with a surprised expression,
amid rocky chunks of construction debris
apparently dropped from the skyscraped heavens.

Had it been scurrying about,
the vermin would have startled, menaced,
repulsed on a visceral level.
But in the stillness and repose of death,
the taxidermied-looking rat
came across as sympathetic,
an unwitting victim of a random fate.
It could have been any of us.

Its eyes bulged, its limbs seized.
I almost stopped and snapped a picture,
tweeted the tragedy out,
before thinking better of it.
People instinctually reject rats, like clowns.
I thought about scooping the piteous corpse up
with an alt weekly, tossing it into a dumpster,
giving it a little dignity. But I was in a hurry
and it was just a rat, after all.

Pounding the pavement with purpose,
I did a sign of the cross,
and prayed a little valediction.