Susan Sonde

My black and white tuxedo cat stares up at me. His world was once a cane, the hours took turns beating him; hung him like a slab of meat in their abattoirs. Rage cut his tongue in two. Tonight the wind retaliates. The leaves prattle on and on without surcease. Dust hurls itself at passersby. UPS delivers daily

the long insomnia-riddled nights. Clocks grow surly and the Devil leaps from a deviant’s throat. East to west, stove tops hustle, pushing kettles beyond their boiling points. The world’s gone rogue, juggles live bands and hand grenades while it wire walks. Sighs and whispers say all’s ending, yet the clouds still patrol the morning skies, yellow-gray in their gray barges.
Query the sounds a mad woman hears. Query the thoughts her mind shapes, the cries snow makes falling knife-like towards her throat.

What if the fork that nestles in a napkin’s folds ransacked the cloth in which it shelters and thinking for itself just long enough, found a heart in which to thrust itself? What if sunset called and no one came, or the sand on beaches

decried their emptiness…absence of footfall saddening them. Oh sunset your ravens worry me, your chicks are poorly loved. Deafening are the blows dealt the one who receives them. In air silence resonates, holds secrets to the stars and compound interest.

Some believe in the benefits of believing; invest heavily in the concept of an afterlife: standing room only, angels crowding about them, wings stuffed inside Hawaiian shirts; leis caged around their pale white throats.

Oh child of aging bone and fur, oblivious on your cushion. I kneel beside you…starving inmate invited to a banquet. Let’s enter our eternal rest together: ours the chair in which no one’s ever sat, ours the sea in which no protozoan ever swam. No doors lead out that don’t lead in.

No knowledge there of the weather, none of the blues. No shuteye to offer the departing.