Building of Unseen Cats

[mercifulserpent]

When I woke up, it was the middle of the night and
my building was on fire. The hallway was not filled
with smoke, and then quickly it was. I rescued a few
older men from their bathtubs, a few babies from
their cribs. Outside, the air was filled with hair.
Everyone but me was holding a plastic cage with a
cat in it. We weren’t supposed to have cats in my
building, but there they all were, an invisible nation
suddenly uncurtained into a blinding and brutal
world. Everyone looked at me with a face that said
let’s never speak of this. Let’s not look directly at what
is meant to be loved in secret. Let’s, for example,
imagine the sea is always, constantly, and forever
spilling toward us, that our screaming building is
something worth escaping.

Zachary Schomburg

Comments

[betacandy.livejournal.com]

That... strangely reminds me of a Duran song published the year before this poem. "The Man Who Stole a Leopard" is about authorities leading a man and his leopard out of the apartment where he's been hiding her for ages, rarely leaving her side because he's besotted with her. It's very strange, and ought to be a metaphor for something very creepy, but the line that repeats most often is "don't spill my secret" and something about it speaks to something more universal: the need to hide something of ourselves from an all-consuming existence.

Or maybe it's just my sinus meds, LOL. I've been loopy lately.