Conscious Cat

A poem about a cat, and a deliberate break in the weather. Most of the writing gathered here works hard — on coherence, on the explanatory gap, on what a sentence is doing — and this piece exists to interrupt that seriousness on purpose. It is an acrostic, it is funny, and it is meant to remind the reader, and the writer, that the person behind the framework is still a human being who lives with an animal that has opinions.

It also earns its place in the corpus honestly. Perspective is the recurring subject of nearly everything here — what the world looks like from where you happen to be standing — and a cat is a genuinely foreign vantage sharing your house, running its own economy of attention on furniture you paid for. The poem takes that seriously enough to be playful about it: feline consciousness as a small daily proof that other minds are real, differently arranged, and entirely uninterested in your explanations. It became the seed of a longer book now in progress. Read it for the joke first; the relative perspective is underneath it if you want it.

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