in his mouth
a dead rat
The Bamboo Hut Press, 2014
Note: This haiku with a pivot deals mainly with breaking "Omerta," the traditional Mafia code of silence: when an informant "rats" to the police, he is later found dead with a dead rat stuffed in his mouth. It's thematically, visually, emotionally, and most importantly, socioculturally different from, yet allusive to Michael McClintock's haiku below:
dead cat. . .
open-mouthed
to the pouring rain
The Haiku Anthology, 1986
