Dead Cat Clearer

I never swung a wooden sword at slow bees,
Kept something dying in a box beneath a bed my father's father built for me.
Never fed a mare honey and seed from my hand,
Or held a harp.

These things would melt me.
And then
They would have won me.

Doth the dark precede you
In your swift and ample ever?
Or simply punk you
Near ledge, treasure, and lover.

You were amiss before stained glass.
Its beauty never pointed at you.
Yet you held on bare legs the curing body of a dead-ended cat
Below a porch,
Beside a boulevard.

You saw its sucked flesh pulled by days of dirt and degrade from the gentle center of its lower jaw.
All that was soft to it now had left.
Eye holes, cat,
Eye holes, claw,
And cracking flesh.

And it was beautiful before you.
Made you cry and beg for what the day entrusts you.
Made you cry and harden.
Finally, you'd been given morals you can understand.
The cold below all rules and human hides
Blew white before you in your boyhood.

And you pricked your yet-bitten finger with a bit of broken bottle
And dripped your boy-blood in to its mouth.
Making a pact with depths that you could never make with other children.
Feeding your kitten.

And were you asked at such young age to spend a year of weeks beneath the Earth
Asleep beside either of your grandfathers going gone?

You would have.

And you would talk to their husks
With the wheeze of your sleep-child chest.
And give them grace as they fall to a simpler thing
Of compounds and languagelessness.
Where things are slowed.

Thinking in child alchemy -
Your eyes grinding light from the darks,
Weaving what's leaking through the porch wood in to sight -
You caught yourself slipping double-A's in to its brittle throat,
Wrapping it in newsprint once again.
To be buried forever in a ply of fading press and Yankee box scores.