Some time since ink bled
On these lazy fingertips, poet
Clean hands; a disgrace!

may i always write words more naked than flesh,
more stronger than bone,
more sensitive than nerve.
may i always dip my finger into rivers of ink that will never run dry.
on the days i am not an ocean or a shipwreck,
may i always become an anchor.
may i understand that somedays words are a bridge,
and others are the fire that burns them.
that sometimes i write the words,
and that sometimes the words write me.

I contend that it is not my place to give testimony or
To tell what love is but that I must include love
Here now so that I can get on with my story
Intelligibly with the help of the word itself
Without any other ideas or explanation for it.

Dr. David Dosa, speaking on behalf of Oscar the cat,
Stated that Oscar was never wrong and that Oscar
Seemed to have some innate ability to know when a
Patient at the Steere House Nursing Home was going
To pass - going all the way back to when the cat was a kitten.

Dr. Dosa went on to say that the pernicious, anti-social cat
At the Rhode Island center would only cuddle up to those
Patients who were in their last 2 to 4 hours of life.
The talented Oscar has proven the medical staff wrong on
Several occasions when patients were close to death.

Dr. Rosa – when asked about Oscar’s accuracy stated
That Oscar was right 100% of the time and that to his
Knowledge or to his staff’s knowledge that Oscar had
Never gone in and cuddled up to any person who was
Not near death, something that he had to accept - that
The cat had better instincts than he – a doctor – possessed.

At present, I hope that I have sufficiently captured
The reader’s understanding that there are yet many
Things out there in the real physical world that neither
Science nor religion can understand but I know what
Oscar knows – what he knows is this thing called love.

Now that phrase is not at all to my liking.
For to say a man is fallen in love, -
Or that he is deeply in love, -
Or up to the ears in love and sometimes
Even head over heels in love carries
With it an idiomatic implication that love is

Somehow beneath the man (fallen) – something
Regurgitated in Plato’s opinion which with all his
Divinity ship – I for one hold that the thought of Love
Being beneath a man be damnable and heretical.
While Oscar the cat simply says – let love be what it will.

And possibly, just possibly - gentle reader -
Without any further current explanation, so do I now
Join ranks with Oscar as I write of a love that is
Alive and well – and if I do not come and cuddle
With you it is not because I do not love you.

Tis but my task to find those in greater need and
When I find them near death, afraid or lost
I, like Oscar, I know of their fear and of their
Desperation so with pen in hand
I purr next to them cajoling

Them onto their next great experience.