resonant | the indigestible furball of the poem in the heart (for Poetry Month)

This is from a book of poetry parody called Poetry for Cats by Henry Beard, which I very much recommend if you like both poetry and cats.

I read this poem out loud to my cat once and she watched me with rapt attention and then said rrRRRrr in the tone a human would use for 'whoa.' Have read her the poems from the New Yorker from time to time since then, but she's not as enthusiastic about them -- but then neither am I.

Meowl by Allen Ginsberg's Cat
by Henry Beard

I saw the best kittens of my litter

abandoned by humans, feral

delirious rabid,

propelling themselves through the

calico weeds in overgrown

railyards, searching for a catnip hit,

silverwhiskered hipcats purring in

blissful herbal intoxication

leaping to bat the hard white

moon-ball bouncing in the

black-top sky,

who crossed the paths of

superstitious pedestrians and

strolled with ominous

nonchalance under window-

washers' ladders,

who cowered in the window of

the A.S.P.C.A. shelter

hoping that the lunatic in the

loden green loungewear

would adopt the paranoid

parrot instead,

who ran through the subway

tunnels pursued by herds

of rats as big as broncos

rhinos hippos, enormous

armored rodents hammering

along the knife-bright

rails on horny hooves,

who were chased by stir-crazy

dogs in Central Park and

clambered up Cleopatra's

Needle using the edges of

the smog-softened heiroglyphs

as paw-holds and sat

laughing on the pointed peak

at the impotent mutts below,

who whined and shrieked like car

alarms in the brownstone

gardens of uptown matrons

until they put out the leftover

gravlax appetizers in a Spode

china dish,

who fell off a ledge of the Plaza

Hotel trying to evade the house

dick after browsing on room

service trays and landed on

little cat feet ten stories down

this is a true story and walked

away totally intact, and didn't

even rate a photo in the Post

let alone Animal of the Year

on the cover of Time magazine,

who caught and killed and actually

ate a pigeon in Herald

Square that tasted of rust &

grease & pizza crusts &

bus exhaust,

who bit the animal control officer

on the ankle and dived into

a storm drain and thereby

narrowly avoided ending up in a

lab cage at Brookhaven wearing

a plutonium flea collar,

who slipped into an exhibit of

dadaist art in a gallery in

Greenwich Village and dined on

cheese cubes and cheap Chablis

for a week until the artist showed

up and petulantly declared that

although the jar of water beetles

and the box turtle with the padlock

on its foot were part of his aesthetic

conception, the cat most definitely

was not,

who were adopted by Mafiosi while

hanging around in an alley

next to the Fulton Fish Market and

lived for a month in an

overdecorated duplex on Queens

Boulevard until someone

found the decapitated corpse in the

trunk of an Oldsmobile at Newark

Airport, and the cops came, and

the lasagna ran out,

who lived happily for one whole year in

a mouse-bountiful bookstore on

Broadway which one blown Monday was

bought by Moloch Inc. a national

chain which put up metal detectors

and Garfield posters and hired an

exterminator,

who paused halfway across the

Brooklyn Bridge's vibrating

wire-woven web looking for the iron

spiders, and saw instead a madman

make a clumsy human jump into the

oily Lethe's filthy Bronxward flow,

and thought cats would never do that

what with their allotted span of no score

and 10 to 15 years, not exactly a life

sentence, and all that slimy fur to

clean and dry if they failed,

who saw a fifty-foot Kodak kitten on a

billboard in Times Square and hallucinated

a King Kong Kitty stroll through

midtown Manhattan pulverizing multitudes

with two-ton paws,

and who afterward bounded through the

sour streets inspired by a vision of the

power of the meow the holy vowels the

ultimate animal mantra the lone

phenomenal feline diphthong,

to repeat the one sound song shout

pure mysterious yell containing all

words phrases speeches novels

pamphlets leaflets ballads epics

textbooks archives monumental

columned bibliographies filled with

infinite alphabets of

unfathomable meaning,

the burned-out stray and bebop misfit

cat, unowned, who beat skulls numb

with metered feet and cried out loud

what cats have said before and still

have yet to say in all the eons after

death,

and reappeared nine lives later in the

tinsel socks of fame in the blazing

arc-light glare of the tube and trumpeted

America's rampant love of dear sweet

pussy in a Hail to the Chief Cat

saxophone caterwaul that scattered the

dogwalkers down to the last

pooper-scooper,

with the indigestible furball of the poem

in the heart coughed up out of their own

bodies onto the absolute center of the

immaculate carpet of life.