Poem About a Dead Cat I Found at Carino's

We are murderers.
Our substance is murder:
Our hunting eyes, our
long fingers, our
brutish thumbs, even
the hot breath off our tongue
is murder.

Even the our best
intentioned, the well
intoned, the perfectly
measured assemblies
of our gnosis are ladened
with that fearful capacity.

And were I a pigeon
or a mouse or some
critter trapped here in
our dense matter, our
thousands of thundering,
gas-smelling islands, I might
seize with the urgent horror of it,
of being entombed by these
machines a hundred miles thick.

Of all the powers of the
cosmos, of all the spheres,
of all the sephirot, all the
forces impersonal which
reign their Judgement, who
would have thought it would
be a chair --a chair!-- to
snatch up that spirit.

I was made the sad
accomplice for having
to bare witness -- because
didn't some one have to? And
wouldn't it be you, had you
been the one to chance that
place at that moment, on this,
the dry crust of the earth?

I'll share because it wounds, and
to be wounded is like reading
a book, like hearing the sound
of creation, or so we say now
when all of us are fallow fields
for much else but grief. Shush,
you chattering jawbones, let me share:

The poor cat had wandered
in of his own. It must have smelled
like a meal in that building, even
old as it was, but its curious
to suppose how even in our
dried up husks there's enough
to nurture the small
things that wander by:

Our rubbish is mana, sweet vanilla.

But this one, little cat, followed a bird
through the hole in the wire mesh in
the screen where the copper thieves
had, earlier, cut through with their clippers
and made off with only the nickel
off the chrome sheen of handcuffs.

When I found him there, he was
on the seat of the chair, the yellow
one, neck twisted and body
lounging. It hadn't stirred to my
approach, ever clumsy, rubber
squeaking, pockets jangling, even
teeth clacking and cotton
rustling to sharp ears of cats.

So stiff, the body of his fur
calm and unchanging, level
like water on a cool pond.
His arm, I saw, when I stood
above him, was caught
between the slats that made
the backrest of the chair, caught
where the wood tapered to a vice.

There was fight in the wood,
a hard fought fight, but only
teeth marks in the lacquer
and chips in the veneer.
And there was fight in
the joint of his arm, a
hell of a fight, and
I could see all the
work of it on the floor,
beneath his mouth
in a heap of black,

So it was that chair,
the yellow one,
and not the purple next to it,
or the blue, or the red,
that had brought him
thirst and hunger and a
belching black murder.

And had I come earlier, so
what then? Another creature
lives on and dies some
other way in the stomach
of a dumpster, or under the
wheel of a tractor trailer, or
what other fingers of death
are there in this city?

It was only an odd one,
in some ways inevitable,
just a jarring end to witness,
and maybe next time: mine.
So what then? And who
comes in to find me in the corner,
slumped in the chair, and
who writes the poem of me?

I hope their pen is murder; their
eulogy, a fine death and a long
tale of regicide, speaking that
I took the coin of the dead and
passed it on to the Merchant, but
I'll be content if they say he did
nothing but find a dead cat on the
yellow chair at Carino's.