I had a brush-in with e.e. cummings "she being brand" in my Grammar class last week. I became obsessed to try something new following the notion of trying to sexualize something unsexual? Whatever. First attempt. Very rough draft.

These days my favorite hamster drifts awall,
though his bark-laden cage is still here.
So many times we watched that hamster throw
his head into the wood, splaying
musty scraps of pine and pricking prodding
fingers down into the cedar slices. Voyeur-like
we noticed how the bulging bead of his eye
would close around itself before diving                                  in and out
in and out of the dangerous.

Why did he dip himself in raw temptation?
His skin burned and chafed like a ripe and swollen
aril, and I, scraped and sighed finality.
Still he weasled on. Perhaps to hole up
in the familiar. Perhaps to hide the seeping bruises
of his adolescent recall. Did daddy damage him
the day he disappeared? Or was it when his mom
threw him out? Let him sleep curbside.
Maybe all he was really hiding
was the truth that I'm the closest he'll ever be
to pure abandonment.
Of sense. Of fear. Of self.

Whatever it was, with rodent quickness, his s l i p p i n g
body burrowed into fragmented trees,
waiting for the branches to reach out and wrap
its tired arms around the shudder of his (s__)*,
so that the moment when his little hamster life went limp,
drained from the ability to rise, I could not
disguise my silent relief, but you,
my darling, could not break eyes
from the absent, unmoving evidence
of your shame. 

*I hate to put the word "soul" here. I am striving for some particular word, I just don't know what it is yet.