Haiku Haiku, Fattened Feral Kittens, Hobgoblin Test

Haiku Haiku

The hope is always
that the thrown stone sends ripples
all they way to shore.


Fattened Feral Kittens
for Blanche, Medea and Moose

The wild lives more in you three than the other cats.
Though most of your lives have been spent
in a dry house with air conditioned against the seasons
and you eat with regularity ample enough

to have given you generous guts,
when you smell the spring-- the time
we calculate your birth to have been—
wafting in through screened windows

and watch the bird play and squirrel play
and the twitching of cottontail noses
and press your paws against the back door glass
and stare transfixed, ears erect and alert,

we know your six first weeks
among the weeds, shrubs and tree bark
and your mother's damning eyes
pull at you like the moon on the oceans

and you want to scratch the eyes
out of the furred and feathered things
that chirp and strut their freedom
just beyond the glass, just out of reach.


Hobgoblin Test

If I should fail
to contradict myself,
please check my pulse.

I might be dead,
a room temperature mouthpiece
for history, revised.