Contributor: Donal Mahoney

- -
In your mind you hear
words snarling
all day long
but no poem arrives.
The words are locked
in a cat fight,
syllables flying.

You hope the words
sleep well tonight and
wake in orderly fashion,
the way your cats
stretch at dawn
and wait to be fed
with feline decorum.

In the morning
the poem arrives
word by word,
chips off a diamond,
so you stop shaving,
grab a pen and
take dictation.

You write the words
as you hear them,
tweak a line or two,
and go spelunking
in your mind for
the right title.

Later, in celebration,
you tote a blast horn
to the roof
of the building
and announce
what agnostics suspect
and atheists know:

Cats are poetry.
Dogs are prose.


- - -
Donal Mahoney lives in St. Louis, Missouri.