A Pocketful of Poems

Cupid’s Apprentice Yes, I’m Cupid’s apprentice. But he’s the lucky one. He got love. Therefore, with tousled locks of golden hair he beats his wings for maidens fair, fluttering o’er woodland paths divine where lovers walk with hands entwined. The Queen of Hearts then sets him right. She guides his arrows in certain flight. Then all you singles now are wed, lying as you are in Cupid’s bed. I didn’t get love. I got words: nouns, verbs, pronouns and adjectives. Relative clauses. Not for me a shady grove, flowering garden or courting bench. I was handed a writing tablet and ordered to fill it with words, inch-by-inch. So, with jumbled thoughts in fraught despair I beat my pen for phrases fair. Down the page and then back up, tasting rejection’s bitter cup. I pray Mercury doth alight to make my words steady and bright so I, a stranger, could taste fame and be a man who’s mastered his game. Tis true: The son of Venus never misses. Yet I wait for Mercury to blow me kisses. Cats And Wives My cat loves me but swipes with razor claws so people say I should give him away because he sometimes hooks one in me. It’s scary, granted, and painful to watch a thin line of red open up along my arm or leg. You rat for a cat! Once again you’ve done your master harm. But those same people who say give him away don’t see him rubbing my shins at four a.m. when my feet hit the floor and here comes Buddy Boy with steady tread and oh so happy to see me again. Then he sits on my chest purring and splaying two white paws with ten sharp claws that gently knead my breast, each claw a pinprick hinting at a veiled threat of pain and more bloodshed. Instead, I delight in watching him purring and loving and kneading me. And sure, that little rascal with a pink nose and white toes melts my butter when he stares me straight in the eyes and says: You trust me not to rip your heart out, don’t you? And I, thinking of consequences, gulp and say yes! Wise men say the truth hurts and love sets us free. I ponder this as my cat sits idly on me purring and kneading me, loving me and smiting me just as you, wife, sit idly on my heart, purring and needing me, loving me and smiting me, pinpricking with your claws whispering: You trust me not to rip your heart out don’t you? And once again I gulp and say yes! Eckhart Tolle says he’s known a few Zen masters, all of them cats. I think my kitten, whom I found trembling and starving under a car, isn’t into Zen. He favors claws, paws and mice -- not meditation. And you my dear? You’re an enigma, a riddle. I know little about cats. Even less about women.