It comes from nowhere
It's the faint, burning prickle
Springs behind your eyes
Bidding you stop and wonder
Why your breath caught in your throat.

Thought is finding its shape,
Becoming stronger¹,
And word by word,
Layer upon layer,
Self-erasing,
Taking form².

The mind is a collage
Creating itself from cut-up scraps¹;
It is a sculpture built by a flowing
Fountain of sand,
Both constantly being eroded
And being formed

And grown by the erosion²,
The sculpting fingers of erosion¹,
The sculpted shadows of forgetfulness².
Grains of memory
Beneath the fingernails¹,
They fall, they forget;

One remains².

In the confines of the house's backyard
there are no marked graves at all to see
but an attempt will be made by this bard
to relate according to personal memory
of some creatures buried therein to be.

Over the course of many years gone by
various creatures have been laid to rest
in the soil of the yard's ground to comply
with an improvised simple funeral blest
by a short little prayer to end their quest.

There were a couple of cats it is recalled
one of them was within the property born
though with the other memory has stalled
which is not surprising and hardly forlorn
to blame or point at with a finger of scorn.

Then there were also a few local birds
mainly sparrows that were regularly fed
which flew all around and dropped turds
being a little distressing to find any dead
some due to after eating crumbs of bread.

They were preyed upon by neighbors' cats
and left for dead when they were disturbed
in their instinctual appetite that included rats
when by humankind were scared and curbed
due to their wild nature's feast so perturbed.

Then on occasion also mice would run free
which were seen coming through the fence
and when at times chased scurried up a tree
where they would hurry to get away thence
a similar burial applied if found dead hence.

It'd be so incomplete here not to mention
all those spiders and insects that had died
in some way or other due to a pretension
that their annoying habitual nature implied
to be poisoned or squashed in their stride.

They have all been buried in the backyard
in various places there that are not marked
laid to rest in the ground either soft or hard
under where others had roamed and barked
in the distant past after they were all carked.
____