H.G.T.

She always smoked, and she tasted like perfume and ashes.

In the light through the blinds she was a sleeping tiger with the lines of a woman, and I didn’t know where I stood even as I lay there.

I knew the following afternoon, our morning, I’d fill my pockets with my packets of poison and my waistband with oiled iron, brass and lead.

I also knew no splinter of doubt in the concept that nothing I said or did would buy her heart, in any sense as true as my gun or my need, but there has to be a way to keep score or the game ends.

I’m not a thing born in pauses; hesitation is not my crucible. If you came against me, you would surely die.

Yet I look at this sleeping cat next to me and I know I’m unmanned and beaten.

I’ll go out on her quest when next I wake, shred the world in the name of her needs.

Maybe I’ll keep a little bit for myself. I’m no saint, unless there’s a saint of gun-oil or poison powder, or maybe a saint of midnight stillness, a patron for those who huddle in sodium arc lights at bus-stops and coffee holes until the dawn slays the demons and they can slink toward their burrows.

One night I take my prey from these people, their patronizning saint, and the next I’m the voice in the dark calling out, “Let him go. Leave him be.”

White fence-picket limbs spiderwebbed with faint ink pause in their paths toward there prey; stubbled heads turn my way and bob like the beak-turrets of carrion birds.

They melt away, usually.
Most things with eyes know that this potion is poison, that I’m nothing that bluffs, nothing good to eat.
I’m nothing at all, except a way to test your agnosticism in a dark alley. 

Some, though, are made of sterner stuff; they don’t melt so quick. They come on forward in a blood rush, glittering at the corners and dipping paws into pockets, but soon enough they chase the other home, folding in new ways and damp in new places.

The bundle they’d surrounded is balled up like a sea-thing, but on investigation, it’s a kitten version of the cat, a little bit of a thing that burns quite bright.

The kitten has no owner now, so it follows me, and it doesn’t speak.

It sees me do my thing that day, trade the things for the other things.
It follows me through my day, sees the people I see. It – she – moves in my wake like a gull.

This should alarm but doesn’t, because the kitten’s no danger at all. It’s coming home with me, and it doesn’t need to be afraid.

I get home before the sun comes up to blind us all, and I show the cat the kitten. 

Inside, even though I’m never tense, I’m tense. The cat scares me because my rules can’t alwasy be put on her, so it’s a tense moment.

No worries. The cat likes the kitten.

The kitten will be a tiger someday. She’ll take care of the spider boys by herself, and she won’t need the bad old man to walk with her.

Seeing the cats together calms me and speeds my heart, thaws my veins.

I don’t know if I can afford these girls.

I don’t know if I can live without them.

I do know no one will take them. I do know that they’ll sleep in peace under my roof. That’s all I can do for now.

That’s all I can do, now, for then.

*****

Lyric for the Day

“Honor was not just a word
To knights of old who pledged their faith
In love over gold, love over gold.
Now they laughed at his fantasy world
And maximized all the potentials to earn 
The middle class was too blind to see
The true nobility of Don Quixote.”