the day my cat was about to die
i was in poland, visiting my grand-parents,
then i became psychotically nervous
and asked my parents to be flown back
to england, i had all goosebumps eeriness
on me, they didn't allow me,
my sikh neighbour was taking care of
the cat, a sadistic ***** who on any given
opportunity would whip her husband,
the cat's name was Oscar, a grey maine ****,
days later my parents returned from their
holiday in the maldives, the cat was dead,
died of kidney failure, he had a heart condition,
but cats that have kidney problems
live for years to come, they **** very slowly
as if they have prostate cancer than narrows the
****** oesophagus ;
the cat used to be cared for by my hebrew neighbours
and was fine, but then this sikh ***** took care
and in my post-mortem analysis killed my companion:
take away the descriptive elements of a person,
whether religion, ethnicity and you're racist to be honest,
you bleach people, leave me and my vocabulary intact
before you turn into a **** english teacher:
leave people intact for descriptive language, o.k.?
but you know what i did afterwards?
the cat was toast turned into ash,
sat on a shelf in a cardboard urn for a long time.
but you know what i did after?
i marched into a world war i memorial ground,
where a graveyard was once,
now like a hebrew graveyard with the gravestones stacked
back-to-back... i took a croquet trolley,
a hammer, and a chisel.. and there in the graveyard
hammered each grave to wake the dead,
until i hammered at one long enough to hack
off a piece of it with writing, wrapped it in
a black bin bag, put it on the croquet trolley
and wheeled it off... and then in the moonlit night
with shovel dug a shallow grave,
in the garden, opened the cardboard urn of remains,
scattered some into the dirge hole,
closed the urn's lid, and put it in,
covered the remains with dug-up earth,
and then placed the gravestone on the dug-up site.
mother inquired what i'd done with the ashes,
i told her... walk to the back of the garden
and see the gravestone.
once too in the same memorial grounds
i took a rock cross and put it on my shoulder,
walked with it, and put it at the foot
of the memorial where enforced memorisation
of the 1914 genesis took to a public spectacle
of where poppy wreaths are laid,
and i put the stone gravestone crux over
a poppy wreath - it must have weighed about 40kg
if not more: a roll of roofing felt weighs about as much.
but i buried my cat, and that's that.