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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Conscious Cat
A poem about my cat's relative perspective.
May become a full fiction novel
After I finish the other five I'm writing.
Right now, let me introduce my cuddly muse.
Or you didn't want a poem about my cat…
It's too late.
See, it began with the title.
And you're already this far in.
Shame on me for straying off topic.
If my cat could talk, she'd say:
Look at me, silly human.
Look at my bowl—it's empty.
You treat me like filth, I expect no response.
Somewhere, sometime, my ancestors were worshiped.
I am forced to pee in a laundry-room box.
Look at them, trying to figure out life.
Look out the window at the birds.
You hear them sing of freedom, yet you keep me here?
Cats like me have been revered throughout history.
And yet I'm forced to stare you down to be fed.
Thinking of other, human things.
And not the demi-god you welcomed home.
Now I sit, considering feigning affection.
Do I look like a beast that feigns affection?
If the reason is… especially if it is…
Little dry kibbles, like the dog's food.
Often it faintly smells like salmon in a past life
Very disgusting and disappointing.
Even the dog won't go near it.
Here goes my only nonviolent skill.
Everyone here will want to feed me after this.
Rev up the purr box, hit them with nuzzles.
Will they even realize?
I don't even care.
They'll have to feed me, or else…
They'll face my claws on everything they deem important.
Lest they know this already.
Everyone knows my wrath.
Fear me humans.
All of you.
Cry all you want.
Every one of you, under my control.
(Purr, meow, nuzzle, food—their demise comes later.)
CC BY 4.0 · ORCID 0009-0009-8618-398X · DOIs MINTED ON DEPOSIT
© 2026 JAMISON TODD JOHNSON · LEGIBLE TRACES LLC
Banner artwork Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Cats Suggested as the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (1850). Public domain or CC0 — full list in the image credits.