Cat

A cat listens to strong winds from inside a cave.

It has never known human hands.

The sun is setting outside of any screens.

The animal feels a sort of contentedness.

(The prey has been consumed.)

Sky is a conflagration and knows nothing.

Cat faces conflagration and knows.

(The face is a sort of conflagration.)

This knowing is a way of being.

Inhuman, as humans are inhuman.

Time is permutations and nothing more.

But there must be a matrix.

The cave serves the cat as a sort of second self.

There are extensions of mind, which is place.

No one in Europe has invented a door yet.

This is the closest thing to a door.

I mean this poem, this cipher.

A Cat With a Concussion

The cat with a concussion runs through the Snipers Market, formerly the Flower Market. She can no longer do the things she loved to do. She cannot toy with a dictator's laptop mouse, mischievously. This cat with pure white fur, who has been blinded and deafened by a bomb falling through the roof of a room where she had been pleasantly sunning by a window, dashes madly now into walls and the legs of running children fleeing other explosions. The bullet that enters her brain had a prayer scratched on its shell by a young man who died Tuesday. The child soldier who shoots the cat is severely reprimanded for wasting a bullet. This stern rebuke comes from another child soldier who had been one school grade above him a few months ago.