Rat Meister’s baton-busy tail flashes against the steady hall lights. Standing upright on his humming haunches, the five toes on his fore feet touch each note as they swell the air and fill hungry ears. His mystacial vibrissae (to the unenlightened: his whiskers) average eight sweeps each second, sensing as objects what others know as music. They follow the wind to create an Euler spiral (think negative infinity), swirling in alternate directions at times, neither defensive or aggressive towards music critics, channeled towards woodwinds and brass instruments. The blur of drumsticks. The tinkle of a triangle to tantalize his organs of touch and rounded erect ears. They approve of the musing of Archimedes (r = aθ) where r = ramblings of Archie of Medes and his Teth or voiceless dental fricatives. A cosine of the rhythmic sines of the time indiscriminately following the wind. Rat Meister follows no such tangents. He measures angles with the assembled ensemble of trained and tuned rats whose eyes and ears follow his raton. The walls swell. Spirits lift. The divine spirals away towards awareness and enlightenment, twin reciprocals of the radius, a staff or stave where note heads do battle space unless del segno appears and stutters ear nauseum.
The author hopes to one day to once again volunteer with the Maryland Book Bank, CityLit, and return as writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. Other pubs include: Loch Raven Review, Dead Mule, Free State Review, Little Patuxent Review, Pembroke, & Mad Swirl. He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992). Recently, his 160th prose poem was published under a checker-board cone of silence.
