Poem: The Cat that Caught the Muse

Black blue Cheshire grin swings

First left, to nine o-clock, then right, to 3 o-clock

Fist fights in the saloon

Backstreet lampooning strangers in strange shapes

Cats dancing degrees in protracted phases of the moon

And love lights the lamposts with that glow only the touch

of a brush in the eye of O’Keiff could refrain from indulging

While a chip slides off the cold shoulder of a tenant of the

sun moon cycle like a broken speaker fallen with the seed

of a shared likeness to fake Master Splinter.

The night broke loose and I flew with wings at seven 

o-clock, not only to flee the harsh effect of 

counterclockwise crackerjack sounds in the summer,

but to deepen the source of fake Master Splinter’s

fallen champion, the old artists of an ancient apocalypse,

the basket case of course being Death of course being

the cause of himself.

Further into the vice grip of sleepy serenade, only the

flow sends me back to face my own. And I see what?

The peaks and troughs of tough times worn in vacillating

tragicomedies, blank to the mind of the hour?

And what worse was there to come?

A fish half-blind in the blond din of endings and

in-between beginnings. Or the laterally-lobotomized

ancillary figments of helpless distant asterisms lost

in the forest of clouds stochastically distributing

the ichor for porous and otherwise diluted persons

of the Earth.

And along came the shrew, with a gait and a forcibly-procured

failed waitress by the cast-iron idealism of the night. That didn’t last.

Why would we stay when the road keeps changing?

Why climb when the mountain rises to meet us?

To pinch the tail of the cat while it clasps the tail of the muse.

No tale could tell the hell it went through. Shredded to bits.

Bedside cures. Pinned-down simplicity. Hard-earned curses.

All to let it go. And to watch. And to capture the beauty, 

the magnificence of minimized madness, which could be

squeezed into form only by the same madness by which it was conceived.