My cat, a sweet but undistinguished commoner, I've named him simply Mr. Gray,
to avoid giving him airs,
has become a shameless lush.

Long ago Mr. Gray lost his jungle instincts.
He can't hunt up a meal for himself now
if his life depended on it.
He can't even pop the lid
of his dinner tin
nor turn a spigot when his water dish goes dry.
I must do all that for him.

If tonight in my sleep
I should shuffle off for that yonder shore,
Mr. Gray would find himself on a long fast,
unless, of course, Providence intervenes
and guides his lazy paws to another spoiler.
But then cats don't have a Providence,
a winged feline guardian hovering overhead
to change the course of Nature's cruel ways.
They have only humans and
they're not always there when needed.
An orphaned cat, yowling for his supper,
soon gets on the neighbor's nerves,
and ends up in that vacuum chamber
at the county animal control shelter.

Tormented by guilt and hoping to rectify
what I've done to my Mr. Gray,
I installed a bird bath.
I installed a bird feeder.
Both within easy reach of the laziest cat.
But no matter, he just coos at birds,
making a strange chattering motion
with his upper teeth and lower mandible.
It seems to be feline parlance for—

My dinner's waiting in the house.
I don't need to squander energy,
and stress arthritic bones
trying to sink tooth and claw
into the likes of you,
getting feathers lodged between my teeth
with each vermin tainted mouth full.
Ugh! no thanks.

So relax my fine feathered friends
and enjoy your evening bath and seed.
You've nothing to fear from me.
Bird flesh can't hold a candle to
the gourmet delights placed before me
every evening from the master chefs
manning the kitchens at Fancy Feast.

Oh what have I done to my Mr. Gray?

Last evening after dinner
I felt the urge to do a little poetizing.
I wanted to pin down, while still wriggling,
thoughts about mankind's place
in the universe, thoughts that had been
tugging all day at my sleeve.

I settled into my favorite antidote
for gravity's ever increasing pull
on aging muscles, a well burnished
overstuffed leather cocoon.

Lamp aglow, tools assembled,
a firm grip on pencil and pad,
I was ready for the agony of the ecstasy,
to borrow Irving Stone's apt phrase.
But soon it became obvious my pencil
did not give a hoot about the universe
nor my thoughts about it.
That wood encased stick of graphite
was in a mood of mischievous mutiny.

I gave it a few more cranks in the sharpener
thinking a sharper point might induce flow.
I held it poised above the intimidating,
yet beckoning whiteness of my pad.
Must have been twenty minutes or so.
Still no gripping word clusters leapt from its tip.
Annoyed I snapped it in two, tossed it in the trash
with the day's other disappointments,
and chose another, a German import
a Staedtler Mars Lumograph HB.
Surely that would get thoughts flowing.
It would be like writing with silk.
But that pencil too ignored my commands.
The tools of the poet's trade were failing me.
Perhaps I was holding the pencil too tight,
cutting off its oxygen, its blood flow.

I tried every gambit in the book, but
nothing resulted in the amalgam of thoughts
I craved, so I gave up, turned off the lamp,
went to bed, and salved the bleeding wounds
of defeat with a good swig of Billy Collins.