Morose, what the cat lacked,
or was that morsels?

Sylvester attended breakfast,
that break time in bad marriages.
Maria howled.

‘The ideal that celibacy
beats off claims
that marriage is moral
but not for the godly

isn’t good.’ She purled.

Sylvester laughed.
Perhaps not noting the tears
in her regarding eyes.

‘Crepehanger,’ he said.
‘Dyspeptic from mousing around?

When we eloped, you didn’t say,
like Donne, to tip your paw
would “impossibilitate”
our lives.’

‘You battle faith,’ Maria said
in what she thought was answer,
‘and feed it to your reason.
No one’s glad.

Our years of marriage
number as our friends.
We talk things out with them
instead of going.

I lost my first friends
marrying (them or me),
and second sets departed
with divorce.’

‘Don’t be so glum,’
Sylvester took more mouse.
‘Your melancholy’s giving me the glums.

Brooding, cheerless dowager of doom,
confusing Eliot’s bang and whimper with
post coital tryst,
I’m going out.
The Doury you brought
me is aptly named,
as are the saturnine tales
you relate, that whip up
no emotion but disgust.’

‘Like gnarled misshapen branches,
you are knotted,’
said Maria. ‘No wonder
I can’t reach your crabbed soul;
it reasons with its belly,
has no ears.’

‘No,’ Sylvester said,
‘I’m more like Keats,
in that I’ll give you
plums, but not my time;

the burls upon my tree
as scratching post,
but not one look into
my private soul.

Devotion’s but annoyance to me.
Please look alive! We leave
to hunt at three.
Fidelity’s for dogs.

And you, who mewl this noon
of marriage pains, can’t
count one pleasure
celibacy brings.’

‘Cel-i-BA-cy? Ach,
Sylvester, PLEASE!
If thou must metric
do it right, or cease.
And don’t cite sight
rhymes back to put me down.

I’m free as verse,
as Bismuth in his bath.
When you are out
my vapours go out too.

The sick at heart
can scarcely warm my hearth.
So leave, for good.
We, married for a day,
(or was it for a night?)
shan’t share a nest.
Go howl into the night
and I shall raise MY kittens
well alone.

You are too old to marry:
second-hand, or, better,
furniture the shops could
never sell.

Now old, morose, and captious,
cat around
and see if I care.
Run along now. Hound!

Misanthropy would be your
human name.
Like Eliot’s cats you
hide your feline nomen

I bet you mutter
there are those who care,
but even mice, whose reasons
we can’t know,

would find “Sylvester”
sad enough,
would go a hundred mice
lives and not ask.’

‘You have no friends,’
the tom, fair stung, retorted.

‘That’s what I said,’ Maria
purred. ‘Our marriage
has no years.’

Her claws struck out
and stroked blood
from his ears.

‘I’ll give you “doleful”,
“woebegone” as well.
“accursed by fate”
and “desolate.”
Now go.’

Sylvester’s marriage,
fluid, leaking out
(he never realised it)
down the spout,

he sprang onto the
windowsill,
the while
he dreamed of
ancient Mormons.

Goofy smile,
not dry, nor tart,
not sullen,
greased his face.
‘Irascible?’ he asked his smouldering
mate.

‘Solein today, from something that you ate?’

The hangdog look he gave her
broke her up.

She licked his ears.

The faith that moves
small mountains
ain’t for cats.

Nor is the artificial,
sterilised
state that Shaw called marriage.

What’d he know?

Content, these cats,
to sour but two lives,
they wallow in unsociability,

and pride themselves on
being so aloof.
An eremitic
couple on the prowl.