If I shrank to mouse size,
Posie my orange tabby
would hunt and eat me,
then nap behind her TV lair
spinning me into thousands
of lustrous striped hairs.
This greedy territorial meat-eater
wrapped in artful orange camouflage
I present on a pedestal as Posie,
Official Scapecat of the Universe.
Bash your fender on the fencepost?
Buy pancake mix bearing trans fat?
Forget to cover the garbage cans?
Blame Posie, our family scapecat.
But why stop there? Nail this cat to a post
and convert her into wafers and wine,
for sending jobs overseas, yet luring
aliens and imports home, posting terrorists
behind every tree…hence those Orange alerts.
She would gladly deny food, medical care,
housing, schooling and lead Wall Street astray
to keep three shifts of masseurs near
and gulp jowlfuls of sashimi and caviar.
Blame this fat cat for rape and war,
mountain-top removal, suicidal vets,
pregnant teens on drugs, oil spills offshore,
plagues, global warming and towering debts.
Indeed, Posie plotted with Maneko Nekos
to pour monsoons and shove the Indian
plate, setting off quakes to unleash waves that
cut cooling from a plant till it spews nuclear waste ….
into the winds and a hole in the bottom of the sea,
leaving no bottles of Asahi beer on the wall,
a mountain range mainly fit for bears,
and bizarre partridges on a warped pear tree.
Charge this fat cat with unleashing clathrates,
roiling the permafrost and Westboro Baptists,
and lobbing from stars, sun, food and stacks
gamma rays and carcinogens toward us.
And when this fat cat is toast, shakes off
her mortal coil of graft versus host,
my think tank will shift blame to that
flaming fearful symmetry…her devil-ghost.
P.S. We've known and befriended many wonderful cats over the years. However, Posie is an outlier...ornery and exceptionally self-centered. Because she does not function as a loving pet and treats one and all as her servants, her roles in our family can be summarized as "moving sculpture," "a warning lesson on animal nature" and "scapecat."
We adopted her from a shelter when she was about eight weeks old. She had ear mites, was very underweight and had to be de-wormed twice. She now weighs about 13 pounds and has just turned 13. She thrives on Science Diet, one of the very few pet food brands that did not get melamine contamination, and has the thickest coat imaginable. I brush her five minutes a day to keep hair balls at bay. We theorize that the previous owners gave up on her mother as a pet and threw her out of doors, but then became horrified by the presence of so many kittens and brought the family to the SPCA.
