I’m sorry to say, Sagittarius,
Your outlook’s still far from hilarious:
They’ll shoot holes in your hat
Or else puncture your cat,
Those nasty new neighbours nefarious.
Waking today under the zodiacal influence of the archer, how can one doubt that it’s solely the astrologer who has the insight to guide us through troubled times: inspired by the crossbow on high, his or her aim is true.
Guess the kettle has run out of cream
And the kitten’s got sick of the steam.
I used to convulse
At the throb of your pulse:
Now I dance to a different dream.
To live outside the law you must be honest, as our Great Poet saith. But it’s not easy to live outside the Third Law of Thermodynamics, which wants us to believe that organised systems tend towards chaos, unless energy is fed in to sustain their structure. Today’s bulletin – not written by me, but slipped under my door by the lovely Angharad – is intended to show me that her vital energy has not ebbed, but is rather being directed elsewhere. I conclude, however, that what has actually ebbed is her ability to organise metaphors convincingly. Unless she mixed those lines up on purpose in a cruel attempt at parody.
While Tolstoy was crashing chez nous
The vodka caused quite a to-do:
A draft press-release
To announce War and Peace
Was repeatedly flushed down the loo.
When Chekhov was based at our flat
The samovar sizzled and spat
But his brow remained tortured:
A draft Cherry Orchard
Went straight in the tray for the cat.
While Nabokov slept on our floor
His anguish was hard to ignore.
One draft of Lolita
Was burned in the heater
Another lined many a drawer.
Great men these may be, but the example they set is a dangerous one. While ‘Writer’s Block’ may seem a lofty phrase – redolent of restless perfectionism, frustrated dedication, and doomed entanglement with a capricious Muse – the fabric of society will surely unravel when the slothful, uncommitted or incompetent start playing for our sympathy with copycat claims such as ‘Banker’s Block’, ‘Roadmender’s Block’, ‘Republican Presidential Nominee’s Block’ and so on.
A hangman, who dwelt in Beijing,
Once dreamt that his cat was a king:
With a wave of its paw
It created a law
That, should he awake, he would swing.
To be alive at all, in this era, is to be somebody’s hangman or hangwoman (or to reside somewhere else on the hang-spectrum); but only in dreams does a person fully acknowledge the prospect of dying by the hand of their own inventions. If this clarity of comprehension invaded ‘Real Life’, should we still be facing such imminent Climate Suicide?
As I sat, with my cat, at the vet’s,
Where a ghastly, huge dog with Tourette’s
Snapped and bellowed and whined,
A Grand Scheme came to mind:
Euthanasia For Other Folk’s Pets.
All true … but let us not be too hard on dogs; it’s so easy to see them as unruly embodiments of all that is vulgar and vicious, and to forget that the cur’s owner in this cameo may feel correspondingly ill-at-ease with the little cat – threatened, even, by the placid decorum with which she awaits her final summons into the consulting-room.
Lord Fortescue ruffles my fur:
I narrow my eyes, and I purr.
We sprawl on the sofa
One lazy old loafer
And one upper-crust bon viveur.
People become like their pets, as the saying goes. Doubtless a similar – albeit opposite – belief is held among cats. Time is running out in mankind’s search for the ‘Reciprocal Osmotic Gradient’ – the so-called ‘Grand Scheme’ – by which our shabby race can live in balance with the remaining non-human animals on the planet. Improbably, however, the present poem depicts a member of the Hunting Classes achieving exactly that symmetry.