There—a stray cat. And I, too, a stray in the alley of my mind. I lean into the silence. And the cat, too, leans. Both creatures pressed by the slow hush of night, by the iron clang of pipes, by the echo that lashes between brick and gutter. Lamp. Stone. Silence. For I am a stray cat, feeding off the scrapping peace that shivers between pavements, that coagulates at the bottom of cracked cups abandoned in cafés by the usual and unusual suspects. I alone, watching. The cat alone, prowling. Two outlines drawn by the same hand of hunger.
He pauses beneath lamps, sovereign in his shadow, indifferent to the gross criterion of sanity that seals my tongue when I would say to a stranger: you are beautiful. For God’s sake, I shall forsake despondency. Yet I am divorced from myself: one self bending toward abstinence, one self to desire—a broker of civil war between our inherent and standardized minds. Uncivil. Uncrowned.
And the cat slips through it all. Neither abstaining nor indulging. Only moving. Only shadow. Yet shadow like a kingly robe. Alive in his gorgeous strangeness, a lord of gutter and night. He passes and repasses, weaving like thread through the city’s dark loom, his motion a spell, his silence a command. His body is instinct—yet instinct magnified, transfigured. Mine, dismembered hesitation. His gait certain. Mine falters, mine shatters.
The difference: his paws strike stone and claim it as dominion, while my thoughts fracture like tossed glass against the alley wall. The similarity: both of us feed on scraps—his scraps of meat, mine scraps of peace—driven forward by that same hunger. Yet in him hunger is grandeur; in me, mere ache. The same loneliness curls, soft and sharp, like smoke that clings to damp corners, refusing to depart. Yet in his stride a majesty, in his stare a dark flame, unyielding. And I, half-ghost, wonder if some ember of that flame may yet burn in me.