After the milking's done,
Farmer gone to house and bed,
Rag-tag tabbies, half-breed furs,
Assemble by the milking stool
Yowl a bit, then settle down to purrs.
Rosined up, a straw-***** bow
Emits a violinic fiddle's skirl,
And one by one the mousers
Stand on twos to take a matted floor.

Come, let us see you pirouette,
You puissant pouncers.
Lightly spin those furry toes;
Sheath deep those claws to put
Perfection in your prances;
Balance on your tails, and spin;
Exercise or exorcise in cattish dances
The feline feelings you are in.

Dance happily and furiously...
Or sinuously and slow...
Whatever moods mouse-
Murderers can feel or know.
Enjoy the dance, ye half-breed cats.
Never mind the jealous schemes of mice,
Nor terroristic plots of leagues of rats.

Sometimes my cat makes a sound like a goat
and because of this I call him Goat Baby
even though perhaps if a cat is capable of making a goat sound
then the sound is not exclusively caprine.  
He has fish breath and I call him Fish Face,
in spite of his quintessential feline features.
And sometimes he gives me this knowing look
and he says “meow”—not “meow,” precisely,
because cats never actually say “meow,”
but he says something to me in the language of cats—
and whatever he says, even though it’s Cattish, gives me the feeling
that he’s more human than cat
and for my sake I have to remind him that he’s a cat.
“You’re a cat,” I tell him. “Did you know this?”
He often responds with a purr, or otherwise rolls onto his back,
which means he kind of wants me to pet him
but he also kind of wants to bite me.
In about thirty seconds, he forgets he’s a cat,
which is good, I suppose, because if he remembered,
he probably would not be a cat.

What a day!
Cats and dogs at a gray soggy play!
And I,
wet like a rat in a bucket emptied spray,
afloat in some other soggy boggy day
when love sloshed in a dismal pool of gray,
floundering in a fiendish feline fray,
stuck and struck in her seismic, sonic sway…

Oh, that catty countenance with fanged sustenance,
turbid turbulence and lurid malevolence,
that midnight ambulance in horrid remembrance!

Hunting stare hunched in her browbeating brow.
Puny purring powwow met with caterwaul and yawl.
Sweet savannah meow gone in  hellish growl.

Alarming anger on an angular arch.
Claws bared in a mad menacing march.
Crisscrossed with a seeping scratch and such!

What a row!
Rage, a full bent feline bow,
ready to lash a claw; or ready just to throw
fire flicking arrows through two slits narrow,
hissing, spitting, screeching and scratching
over my poetry popping pillow!

           Ripping, rooting, pawing and clawing
           my chuffy, puffy, poofy and goofy
           poetry popping pillow!

Insults stood on end at verbal animosity.
No reciprocity to my purring grandiosity.
No curiosity to quell her feral ferocity.

Such feline a fever...
I’m aligned to see cats never.

My cattish brunette, now a silhouette,
bitter a vignette from seismic a duet,
smoldering a briquette on blank a palette.

I wonder why
Sometimes
Do they still look at me?
Does my sight make them feel
Turn away
Fight sadness and longing

Is love replaced with hatred with nothing at all?
Was it love at all?
Was their mind full of me?
Dark eyes smiling
Cattish mouth in a frown

Mascara stains all of my sheets
They caused it
Close my eyes and tip back
My eyes fill with water
My lungs fill with flames
Nothing can ever mend a broken promise

Their body is nothing but hatred
Their smile is nothing but a lie
Their face is nothing but a mask
They are nothing but a stranger