Love At Zero Or Twenty Atmospheres

We gave each other little sips of air,

enough to keep hearts beating, but

hypoxia made us believe it was love.

Your fallen eyelash black on the pillow

turned to a swan,

our future a loaf.

We called its hissing a song and danced

in the night of its wing, warm and blind.

Our marriage in space, though invalid, was dope ballet.

Now we have a cat, and the swan is dead.

I live in our cat's ear,

you on its tail,

composing music out of echos 

transforming motion into purpose,

all of it faux and yet it takes up every space,

Every thought,

every moment.

So we say, "Look at our cat, stuffed with swan,

his head tilting side to side at us,

isn't he absurd?"

He licks his lips and bats us together,

like dolls in the hands of a misfit girl

Laughing, screaming, friendless except for the stuff she can summon from her damaged and endless imagination.

________

for Sunday Muse 117. 

The Barn Cat's Betrayal

Bjorn, at Real Toads, wants us to play a game called Bout-Rimés. He gives us the end rhymes with which we are to compose a sonnet. I hate sonnets. Mine is called "The Barn Cat's Betrayal." It isn't about a cat. Enjoy.

I chanced to lie, but by no chance was caught,
A fetch in a mirror ball; and to him
With the cheek to spin what he has not got,
I say, "The more you grasp, the more I dim."
While my double poses riddles, throwing shade
And dirge down old bricks where the ivy goes,
His sister finds the handsy barn cat's glade--
Me in disguise, with gift of bird and flows
Of every feather, that in stillness lies.
Mirrors shatter, spins cease and turn to stone;
What never draws breath likewise never dies.
Send up a song in funereal tone
And dig the empty caskets from the lawn--
Our gift of dust--for love, for told, for gone.

Panthera Tigris

Let's talk about your tiger.
The one that started following you around,
years ago now,
until you wonder how in the hell you used to slog through the days without one.

The tiger rides in your car with you,
fucking with the automatic windows.
She winds her way through the aisles at Target,
close by your side.
Make way, shoppers!
She leaps into the basket, taking the whole thing up.

Two biddies are scowling at you.
"Isn't it against the rules???"
"That tiger should be in the rain forest.
Or wherever tigers live.
Where is the manager????"

Tiger could care less.
She has fangs and claws that would make anybody crap their pants.
And who knows?
Maybe she has raised little tigers til there were enough baby tigers.
Maybe she has plucked monkeys right out of trees.
Maybe whole villages have had to stay in at night, on her account.

Your tiger wanders the 'burb at 3 a.m.
"Poor stewardship," says your next door neighbor, in a written note.
"Selfish, keeping a wild animal like that," says the busybody across the street.
But maybe the tiger was sick of the mangroves.
Maybe it was lonely there.
Maybe she felt lacking, like a museum tiger, until she found you,
but waking upon receiving your smokin' hot kiss,
she made up her mind then and there.

She stays because she wants to.
She's a tiger.
Who's gonna tell her no,
when she's such a big pretty kitty, and loves you so?
________

for Artistic Impressions at Real Toads