J. S. Watts

from

Cats and Other Myths

 

 

 

Cats and Other Mythical Creatures

 

In sleep you adopt the position of a Chinese dragon,
Or cat leaping from high wall without a safety net,
A twist to your tail and your body
As the dragon leaps and dances with the sun.
Who knows whom you are dancing with
In the chase, catch, kill of your dreams.
Little mice, I hope,
Not little humans.

 

 

 

Crow Song

A Lullaby

 

Crow in the tree top

Carols her song:

The sooner we start, the sooner we're done.

Crow by the grave pitShakes out her wings:

The sadder the sorrow, the sweeter she sings.

Crow in the moonlight,

The black and the white,

Whose is the shadow that troubles your night?

The moon is full to bursting;

Full and fecund, stuffed and bloated,

It matters much.

The eaters will not go hungry tonight.

Beyond tomorrow and falling towards eternity

There will be equal for everyone.

Only now the clarity of the moonlight cuts deep to the heart's emptiness.

Dull organ, it has drained itself of hope.

I can take us to a place beyond,

Riding the night with blood on my claws

And brightness in my throat.

A lullaby for this night and forever.

Will you sing with me, fly with me, die with me?

The moon will give birth again and all will be bathed in her luminance

Or lie forever after in the eclipse of her face.

Will you cease before you are

Or grasp the truth the shadows hide?

One will rise in whiteness with the morning

Knowing the natural bitterness of joy.

Sweet oblivion bless the other,

Just one more darkness among many.

Neither offers the lie of salvation.

Which will you choose -

Yesterday's peace or tomorrow's sorrow?

My wings are bleached by the moonlight,

The white and the black.

Sleep now soft shadow - tomorrow will take care of itself.

 

 

 

The Collector

 

Small marvels and beauty things –
Dead spider corpses, mouse skulls and bird bones,
Oranges as dried out as nuts,
Old metal corroding silently for a decade,
Worm-loved wood iced with cobwebs:
All these he collected for the love of them
And to celebrate life’s perfect construct;
Rotting down road kill to expose
The clean white wonder within.
He admired the octagons, tetrahedrons and parallelograms
Displayed by the tiny eight legged skeletons
Decorating his mantelpiece
Like an altar to the divine structure,
God the geometrician, the theoretical architect,
Or the decline and decay of darker gods.
Tending his growing collection he found himself,
In effect, keeper of the dead,
A guardian to death,
The one true and profane grail.
 

 

Black Cat

 

Welcome to my world, whoever you are,

Night furred imp or guardian angel.

I cannot name you yet,

But I shall have the learning of you in our time;

Projection, familiar, alter ego or protégé.

Come ride the moon's silver with me.

Come and play, the night wind's frisky.

No sense staying reproachfully at home

Like my maiden aunt. The innocence doesn't fit:

The garden shrew knows Armageddon when she meets it.

Those neat black flesh hooks sank into my heart

And shrank me to your size sister.

Let us go hunting, playing men like mice.

We will be their own worst nightmares,

Feasting on their dreams as they toss in guilty sleep.

With the threat of dawn we'll slink back home,

Too full to breakfast further,

To lie in wait on the welcome mat.

This is the game of daytime domesticity:

Two innocents keeping house, love.

 

 

 

Cat

 

Black on White.

The yielding warmth of a summer night

Side by side with the daytime glory

Of a patch of early snowdrops.

A lady of contrasts this:

Softness surrounding strength,

Beauty enshrining cruelty,

And not just the blood and claws cruelty of her kind, but

The unconscious cruelty of the truly beautiful.

Yet in the twitch of a dream pulled whisker

This noble daughter of Bast

Becomes the bundle of juvenile cuteness

That first staggered into our knowing,

But even in the midst of such weakening furriness

The yellow-green fires of the soul are burning.

 

 

 

The Moon Rises Crying

 

The Moon rises crying for her lost love;

The beginning is always tears.

Her empty places echo with his laughter and soft promises of redemption.

Across night's black curtains she haunts her fleeing dreams

Only to watch them fade gratefully into the effulgence of his awakening.

Like some pale ghost outstaying the warning of cock crow

She lingers painfully on the fringes of his raucous brightness,

Hoping at least to bear his memory back to her solitary bed.

Hers is a joyous despair as the Sun's glory eclipses her pale longing

And she fades backwards into night with his laughter echoing once more inside her.

He has always been there, deep inside and beyond her touch,

Ever since the pain of that first hello embraced so many goodbyes.

She cradles his indifference tenderly in place of him,

Dreaming of a union to ignite the midnight sky

And drive away the shadows of truth forever.

His fierce radiance would banish the night and her hopes as one,

Extinguishing forever her subtle beauty which shines

The more brightly for the sweet anguish of his absence.

The Moon wakes crying for her lost love;

The end is always tears.

 

 

 

Beginnings

At the bottom of the garden something stirs
It might be a snake in the grass or, maybe,

It’s just a spring clean for the May Queen?

Maybe. Maybe not. Best not to ask.

Old Mother Nature shakes out her drawers as and when she chooses,

Even in the light of the glacial moon,

But maybe not tonight. Maybe.

Bleached bone white the moon’s lightIs made for revelation,

For showing us the truth of the skull within,

The mouth hole shaped forever in an endless scream.

Such brightness is a final benediction:

The blinding transcendence of the death blow,

The white heat of the bomber’s mutilating kiss,

Also given in the name of truth,

Although whose truth is a matter for conjecture.

With truth comes knowledge.

Whether stolen or given it matters little,

The knowledge will come. Maybe.

Up in the tree the monkeys are calling

With blood on their lips.

They mouth a catechism without words,

Not with the o-gape terror of the primal scream,

Nor the guilty wide mouthed wailing of subsequent falls from grace,

But with the knowing grin of the newly disclosed sociopath.

Their shrieking increases in volume.

Waving bones and more they defy the moon

And her unwanted clarity.

The skull can be broken. They will make it

Crack like a blown egg.

They will overcome and chose their own truths.

The moon is sanguine.

Things change. Things do not.

Some truths reveal themselves.

Beneath the skull, the rage:

Our heritage.

 

 

 

Cats and Other Myths, the debut poetry collection by J.S.Watts, is published by Lapwing Publications. 88 pages of poetry that finds contemporary relevance in the echoes of myth and legend and the mythic in the day to day world around us. ISBN 9781907276644. http://www.jswatts.co.uk/ Find the writer J.S.Watts on Facebook: www.facebook.com/J.S.Watts.page.

 

• Cats and Other Mythical Creatures may (or may not) be appearing in The Punkin House Slumber anthology at some stage

• Crow Song was first published in Orbis, Spring 2009

• The Collector was first published in Visionary Tongue, Sept 2009

• Black Cat was first published in The Dawntreader, Dec 2008