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Sapience
Squeaking, crawling, knowing nothing true,
Mouse subsists, reacts, and lives to chew.
Scavenge, scurry, just an animal,
Sense the world, remain peripheral,
Never understanding old or new.
Till a bolt that strikes with searing blue
Cracks his mind, creates a thought or two,
Forces sight and pushes back banal
Squeaking, crawling.
Lost, he wanders, conjures up a slew:
Tangled notions, values, points of view.
Changed, he must conclude it's magical,
Everything phantasmagorial.
Better? Quite: his power means he's through
Squeaking, crawling...
Mouse subsists, reacts, and lives to chew.
Scavenge, scurry, just an animal,
Sense the world, remain peripheral,
Never understanding old or new.
Till a bolt that strikes with searing blue
Cracks his mind, creates a thought or two,
Forces sight and pushes back banal
Squeaking, crawling.
Lost, he wanders, conjures up a slew:
Tangled notions, values, points of view.
Changed, he must conclude it's magical,
Everything phantasmagorial.
Better? Quite: his power means he's through
Squeaking, crawling...
There's a regular syllable count, but not a regular rhythm. And I think you meant "phantasmagorical."
At first glance, I was seeing this as a "Flowers for Algernon" kind of thing, where the mouse had a couple thoughts in passing and reverted to normal, but now I see the lack of end punctuation on the penultimate line means he's retained the intelligence. It's not the thoughts that are through, it's the squeaking and crawling.
It's a nice progression, but I wish there was something more about what effect this has had on him, how it will change things for him. He says he's done squeaking and crawling, but beyond that, I don't know what will change, and there's nothing about how this affects him emotionally; it's pretty factual about it, even though the narrator takes on a very limited voice at the end.
At first glance, I was seeing this as a "Flowers for Algernon" kind of thing, where the mouse had a couple thoughts in passing and reverted to normal, but now I see the lack of end punctuation on the penultimate line means he's retained the intelligence. It's not the thoughts that are through, it's the squeaking and crawling.
It's a nice progression, but I wish there was something more about what effect this has had on him, how it will change things for him. He says he's done squeaking and crawling, but beyond that, I don't know what will change, and there's nothing about how this affects him emotionally; it's pretty factual about it, even though the narrator takes on a very limited voice at the end.