/lit/ - Literature

[op !3I4SJbCh8M No.3440515]

ITT: submit short stories or passages that you want critiqued, submit, hate, do whatever

Excitement and anticipation courses through them. The group is nervous and the unnatural silence is notable. it is not the perfect day or time for this. They have been standing in a line quietly and patiently for 10 minutes now, waiting for some external stimuli to force their hand. Restlessness becomes a problem, clearly some people are eager to begin but the silence dominates the room. One person says, "fuck it" and starts towards the door. The last person in line smiles as soon as she opens her mouth.

[op !3I4SJbCh8M No.3442382]

They were searching for him. the beams of light sliced through the darkness briefly illuminating various parts of the forest. His legs were tired from being forced into the awkward position necessary for him to remain unseen. His sister yelled out for him. Evoking an emotional response that he quickly ignored. From his elevated position he could clearly see his house off in the distance. It was framed perfectly by the hills that rose to either side of it. The lights were on, giving him a clear view of the now empty kitchen. The chairs were still scattered around the room, the chaos forgotten after his abrupt departure. She cried out again, somewhere beneath him. her voice moving further away, the light no longer visible. He would stay there till morning then leave, never to return. He knew she would keep looking for him for weeks.

[Anonymous No.3442407]

I'ts supposed to be a personal narrative about "adversity".

The alarm clock calls out
Like the songs of a crow.
I wake up to find
I’m late for the show.

It’s a quarter to four, I jump off the floor
My shirt tail hangs loosely behind me.
My trumpet in tow, I rush out the door
My hair is still a bit grimy.

Feeling like a dream, I arrive at the scene
The time was a little past eight.
As I prepare, I tell of my tale
The judge snidely replies, “you’re late”.

Nevertheless, I performed my best
Although I’ll admit it was sad.
The prologue unfurled, the notes almost curled
Like rancid cheese was it bad.

But as the motifs grew longer, the tone quite stronger
The color of the piece did come through.
The melodies bright, the rhythms air tight
The judge found himself a fool.

His failed attempt at utter contempt
For the aspiring musician before him
Flew right out the door as he pleaded for more.
My troubled day had come to an end.

[Anonymous No.3442438]

The slave ran away by the light of a gibbous moon. The twinkling of the stars were unaffected by her ragged steps. Across the harsh, desecrated landscape, the moon’s light etched out shadows of the shrubs that lined the dirt road. Thinking that search parties would find her if she stuck to the roads, she found the pole star and turned off the road to follow it north. Timbuctoo was north, wasn’t it? Thorns stuck into her feet, but the pain said something other than stop; the pain demanded she push further until it was pain no more but a daft numbness. The night creatures of the desert she had grown up with sounded alien to her newly free ears. The skeletal shrubs gave way to rock and sand, and she saw some low huts in the distance. Sleeping goats woke as she passed them and fanned out away from her, tripping over each other to escape in a dreadful scuttle. Their infernal eyes glinted in the wan light.

She found a water jar outside of the huts, and from within she heard the wheezing and snoring of the inhabitants. She dipped the ladel in the water and drank; it stung her throat and washed the dust of the desert into her stomach. Hyenas laughed, yipped, and hawed in the distance. A sick feeling descended into her gut, like she was being hunted, and driven by this feeling she left the huts, heading towards the pole star again. When the sun peaked above the horizon, all she could see in every direction was a sand wasteland. She kept on walking in the same direction, half-crazed with exhaustion but knowing that to stop and give in to sleep would be fatal.
Soon however, the sun took on the dimensions of a malevolent god, making her head throb, enveloping her in a wavering swelter, and her forehead buckled under its weight. The dead world beckoned to her to fall, to lay down and accept into her heart its malign whispering, the sussurations of billions of sand particles jostling one another in the wind.

[Anonymous No.3442505]

>>3442407
>The alarm clock calls out
>Like the songs of a crow.
>I wake up to find
>I’m late for the show.
Nice :) Crow and show is kind of a doctor suess, mother goose, simple minded kind of rhyme... but overall I like it.
>It’s a quarter to four, I jump off the floor
everybody walk the dinosaur
>My shirt tail hangs loosely behind me.
>My trumpet in tow, I rush out the door
another very simple rhyme here four floor door...
>My hair is still a bit grimy.
nice
>Feeling like a dream, I arrive at the scene
dream-scene... more simple rhymes
>The time was a little past eight.
>As I prepare, I tell of my tale
>The judge snidely replies, “you’re late”.
i do not like green eggs and ham, etc
>Nevertheless, I performed my best
>Although I’ll admit it was sad.
>The prologue unfurled, the notes almost curled
>Like rancid cheese was it bad.
haha sad and bad
>But as the motifs grew longer, the tone quite stronger
>The color of the piece did come through.
>The melodies bright, the rhythms air tight
>The judge found himself a fool.
bright and tight, I do not like them sam i am
>His failed attempt at utter contempt
>For the aspiring musician before him
>Flew right out the door as he pleaded for more.
>My troubled day had come to an end.
Such simple rhymes. When you're writing don't 'try' try to rhyme, just let it happen naturally. Forced rhymes will look like "I opened a book, I had a look, it had me hooked, i went to my nook, so scared that I shook', while natural rhymes might be 'the book layed out before me, I implored myself to reason, treasonous seasons that have no meaning' etc...... It just feels different. For me, mentally, the difference is whether I think of the rhymes first (e.g. 'what rhymes with book? oh, I know! look!') or whether I just start writing without a clear idea of how it's going to turn out..... Anyways - just my 2 cents.

[Anonymous No.3442597]

>>3442505
I liked the way you described the two different rhyming patterns. With this I had a clear idea, then I waited to long to write it, got a different idea, repeat, then desperately tried to make it all work. I'm no poet, and this was just a quick thing for a class. I had neither the time or the initiative to do it really well.

What do you think of "free form" poems? I feel there should be some rhyme, or at least make it flow. I don't want to read a paragraph broken into stanzas.

[Anonymous No.3442667]

>>3442597
free form?

Do you mean poems without a rhyme scheme? Or just non rhyming poem?

A lot of poetry that's considered non-rhyming will actually have cute little rhymes littered throughout, but they don't come at the end of the stanza so you don't really notice that it's rhyming. For instance, taken from the Obama inauguration poem:

>My face, your face, millions of faces in morning's mirrors,
alliteration here, face rhymes with face :\
>each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day:
day rhymes with face
>pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,
pencil-yellow and school buses have a similar meter, as does rhythm and traffic lights - lights rhymes with life
>fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows
repeating meter , another 'aye' sound
>begging our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper—
praise also rhymes with face, another 'aye' sound, more repeating meter in two word phrases
>bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,
>on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives—
begging for praise and on our way is a sort-of rhyme - read rhymes with ledge, another aye sound
>to teach geometry, or ring-up groceries as my mother did
geometry/groceries
>for twenty years, so I could write this poem.
'ee' sounds ties in with the last line....

So even in a non-rhyming poem there can be a lot of subtle play that most people wouldn't notice.. There's a lot happening in the above verse even though it doesn't seem to be rhyming.... And, of course, the difference between verse and prose is subjective. For instance, I think most slam-poetry is just stand up comedy with a pretentious meter.

[Anonymous No.3442727]

>>3440515
Now I'm no expert in english, but I think that last comma shouldn't be there.

[Anonymous No.3442735]

"Heavy night. You'd be taken away with God's gifts if you chanced to lift both feet out of them".
"No doubt. Rain's nice falling on them streetlights ain't it?"
"Nice hue indeed. A good orange drenching for them. It'd put out Vietnam. God knows some of them do need it."
"Ah there's no rain fit to wash some of the bastards on these streets, of their sins or their passions."
"Now there's a lady that has no place with that ilk."
"Where?"
"Turning down the alley near the oul' Foley place."
"Which Foley place?"
"The Foley place with the vodka. The Foley place with the Vodka that you loved so dear you had me carrying you away from it on a more piss-strewn night than this one. Christ, the step on her. Never seen such a false step on such a fair young lass. She's near plodding, isn't she?"
"Where, for the love of God?"
"Down there, am I not after pointing it out to you?"
"Ah."
"Ah indeed."
"Ah. Now there's a face fit to frame better nights than this.. Georgie Rasch. You leave her step alone, Darrell Maloney, it's not to you she'll be stepping to any time soon."
"Nor to you Joyce, a girl like that wouldn't be smitten with any oul' bastard like you, it's for the banshees and the grave you're fit for in your current state."
"Should I make to talk to her?"
"Not in your state, Joyce. We're good men but not in this state, not in this light, not in this rain. I know you're mad for this young girl but she has no time for the like of us, she's a girl of great reading don't you know!"

[Anonymous No.3442806]

>>3442735
wouldn't mind anything..

[(1/2) No.3442840]

I haven't written in a long while, this is my first piece of prose in over a year, so if it isn't fantastic or anything, please be understanding but specific. Formal grammar is still a problem I have, I'm too used to writing dialogue.

>When you were younger, were you ever amazing at something, years above your classmates? Were you ever gifted in the sports, hoping to become the next big-league star or Olympic champion? Were you an artist, hoping to inspire the world with a single brushstroke, wanting to shape the world in unseen ways that were stimulated by your works? Did you hope to become a musician, wanting to serenade the world and its peoples with your voice or with your instrumental skills? Or how about an actor, wanting to play as others to show the world both your skills and your self? Have you ever hoped to make a name for yourself, to rise from your sleepy hometown into bright pastures, to become something, someone, new? Someone important? Have you ever wanted to be something better than you? My bet is that, at least once, you have.

[(2/2) No.3442844]

>If you’re picturing your years-old skill, one you might have abandoned a long while ago, I want you to picture something else: what if your dreams were crushed? What if you realized you weren’t to become the next star idol of the world? What if you realized that you would never be able to rise to a greater life, that your skills would be ruined by a broken leg, by carpal tunnel, by tarnished lungs or by paralyzing stage fright? What if, one day, you lost all your skills, and lost the motivation to continue with your original, and truest, dreams? Do you move onto new dreams, the rose-tinted glasses of childhood shattered to reveal an equally bright, less idyllic world, a world of reality, a world that you just eventually learn to live in? Do you wallow in the sorrows, losing all drive for your passions, and, by consequence, every other facet of your life? Do you keep a reminder of your old dreams, a piece of trash to most but a valuable token that would remain precious to you until death? Or do you just pretend that your dreams never existed in the first place, living life as a shell of your former, younger self? What do you do if your world shatters and falls to ruin?

>I want you to consider these questions seriously. What do you do if everything you’ve built your life on was a lie? What do you do when you realize you’re not number one anymore, that someone has stolen that position from you? Do you congratulate them? Do you hate them? Do you envy them? Would you pretend that they don’t exist, to lie to yourself that you’re still the best? Would you try to upstage them, to cement your position as number one? Would you try to use them as a reference point, to improve on yourself? What do you do when you find competition?

>What do you do when you realize you’re only second best?

[Anonymous No.3442850]

>>3442844
It damn well made me feel its feels.

[Anonymous No.3442852]

>>3442727
Should be a semicolon.

[Anonymous No.3442897]

>>3442735
>The Foley place with the Vodka that you loved so dear you had me carrying you away from it on a more piss-strewn night than this one

Move the "that" in this sentence to between "dear" and "you."

And the use of full names seems forced to introduce your characters fully. The use of full names is redolent of a scolding mother, an inappropriate tone for the statement.

Other than that, I rather liked it. Especially the Vietnam line. A nice homage to Joyce and Gaddis.

[Anonymous No.3442935]

the book of bad trips

i took some acid hoping to find truth or beauty or sadness or fear. i watched youtube all night instead and dreamed about writing a clever sitcom.
i am pretty sure i don't want to know what that means but i am glad i hid the rest of the acid

as i sat naked except for a towel worn capewise around my shoulders on the cold porcelain toilet seat contemplating the cause and meaning of the fear that overwhelmed me every time i stood up or removed my cloak
i watched my skin molt translucent and single mindedly
i gazed into the abyss of my own dilated pupils and nothing stared back
blood is seeping through the tiled shower wall and in my vomit i have seen the rise and fall of a thousand civlizations

every story is cut short to its most convenient and logical end
dorothy died in that tornado
captain steve was shot by the pirates
my own life will end in a similarly anti-climactic fashion

i woke up with my ears ringing
only a few hours away becomes years and nothing in the blackness

[Anonymous No.3442948]

Peterman yells into the air, “No, Mikey! FSC!”
He scans the marble plaza frantically, eyes landing on the new bite-size sandwich joint.
“Hey! Huh? Go for home!” he screams. The brushed black dongle jutting from his left ear blinks blue twice.
“Greene's 33X is really not my problem!”
He ends the transmission. Peterman is now on a straight trajectory for Gillian's, little brown suitcase in one hand and an iBooks 2 in the other. He passes a large fountain with water jets. He passes an abstract metal sculpture painted bright red. He passes other suited employees meeting up and taking calls. He hesitates at the Starbucks, readjusting his tie and grunting forlornly before moving on.
Peterman stands in front of the glass double doors of the sandwich shop, waiting impatiently. A girl wearing a pink and black uniform walks around the steel counter to get the door.
“Club BLT, extra strong” he tells the girl as he seats himself on a cushioned stool facing out the court. He leaves the suitcase by his feet and slides the iBooks 2 onto the table. It lights up in a floating 3D display of the water cycle.
“Tomato Mozarella” he mutters under his breath, activating the search algorithm built into his head. He closes his eyes just in time for the Google logo to fade away and be replaced with a yellow bordered box containing two graphs and a promotional video on the publicly traded corporation Tomato 4.
“Cool” he thinks, penis tingling. The word bounces around the inside walls of his cranium and lands neatly into a memory box, where it will stay until routine cleanup.

[Anonymous No.3443305]

>>3442840
>>3442844
Excellent!

[Anonymous No.3443447]

>>3442407
I liked it. It always makes me smile that people still indulge in a bit of poetry ow and then.

[Anonymous No.3443450]

A storm. Ribbons of white light unravel from grey clouds. The woods scream with wind running through its densely rooted floor, chilling every tree's thick, wet flesh. The river swells, made fat by the rain; it threatens to consume the parkway
All the while I stand by my window. The parkway, nestled in between woods and river, always is. The sound of morning always ceaseless hum of tires slapping asphalt, the sight of evening, star-like headlights shining in-between trees.
Broken tree branches litter the ground along with soggy tree bark. The winds have pillaged to their full, but a new discord rings through the thick forest wall beside the parkway. The river has expanded; its newly gained girth lies over the parkway and into wood's edge. A ferocious current of brown flows, roaring as it slides in-between trees and over potholes, picking up every loose pebble and piece of dirt with unstoppable momentum.

This is only an excerpt of a larger story. I know it's a little try hard.

[Anonymous No.3443711]

Sall stretched his hands across the backyard. His fingers were just a few inches from touching the un-sanded fences on both ends. The rotten posts stood crooked and bent, while still towering several feet above the boy. He picked up the dingy camera at his feet and started to snap pictures. Giggling with ignorant amusement, he watched the pictures manifest themselves on little white squares of paper. The images fell onto the dirt and mud of the backyard, and started to weave into it as Sall stomped around laughing.

“Sall, are you here?”

His mouth closed and his feet stopped moving. The last picture wafted down and landed on his toes. He fiddled with the camera behind his back in embarrassment as Romave peered out of the house.

“Where is Siscle, Sall? And what are you doing back here?”

With timid obedience, Sall whispered, “…Siscle found this for me. He said I could use it.”

“Oh, really?”

Romave stepped out into the backyard, her feet crunching the already ruined pictures. She creased her dress and bent down to look at Sall’s play.

“These are all of the fence, Sall.”

She looked back up, and tried to give him a motherly smile.

“Why don’t you try taking pictures in the front? There is a lot more to see than just these fences.”

Still timid, and still embarrassed, Sall could only say, “Siscle wouldn’t like that.”

Romave stretched out and tousled his blonde hair with all the attention that artificial affection could endow. Sall stood still and let her.

“Siscle would be fine with that… that is if he didn’t know. So tell me Sall, where is he now?”

“…He said he was going to be late today.”

[Anonymous No.3443766]

“Allow me to paint you a picture.”
# # #
Sitting at the bar at a quarter to midnight, sipping a flat Miller and burning through a small but not insignificant percentage of my savings, there is no place I would rather be; this is not an endorsement for the bar, necessarily. The Clash goes off, London stops calling, there is a moment of silence, and the cold bleeps and bloops of The Knife cut through the low thrum of background chatter. I’m tapping a pen against the table, staring at the marbled cover a small notebook. The beer sweats.

I tell myself that I’m waiting for an idea. Ideas are the only real currency in the world, as intangible as they may be. I’m not lying to myself. I’m waiting for something, but an idea is simply an amorphous placeholder for a more (or perhaps less) concrete goal. I believe, or I am in the process of convincing myself to believe, that I will eventually have an idea worth pursuing and that idea will direct me down a path which I might find agreeable.

I paint. I have not painted in some time, and this is primarily attributable to a lack of ideas, a lack of inspiration, for lack of a better term. I do not truck in blind expression for expression’s sake. This is perhaps a personal failing, and may be one of the myriad reasons that artistic success has, for the most part, eluded me. Nevertheless, it is how I operate. Or, as the case may be, do not. I am inoperable, my imagination having grown malignant and cannibalistic, keeping all the best ideas for itself, stored up for winter.

None of this matters. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t concern myself with this shit.

I’m up, standing at the bar, ordering a shot of house vodka, most likely Aristocrat, though I haven’t bothered to check. It tastes like Aristocrat, which is to say, bad. I grimace as the shot goes down, puckering me from the inside out.

[Anonymous No.3443931]

The last machine dies
And the empire has come to an end

It all returns to where it came from.

[Anonymous No.3443952]

s with possibility, and all possibilities are it’s facts” - Wittgenstein.
All possibilities.
It is not that any sense of multiverse can be proven meaningfully (for if there were a link between “our” universe and “another” universe, one might call the term “universe” a misnomer). It is rather that a set of axioms may be taken as the basis for a unique framework which, combined with the rules of reason, creates an entire, infinite world of implication, which can be profoundly, dizzyingly complex if there is enough variance to make it interesting. This is the beauty of reason itself. Reason and the created, and the existent, are perpetually intertwined.
How different these worlds can be, and how wondrous that we can perceive them. Taken in this sense, every fiction, even every unique fiction, is a world. It is a system, structured as any by relations, and it is on those relations that we rely for metaphor, relevance and beauty. Reflect on the mystery of your own imaginings, on your own capacity to delve into the wonders of infinitude.
For this is true of our “actual” lives too. O’ how many lives we may yet lead.

[Anonymous No.3443956]

>>3443952
The cropped out beginning is...

"Logic deals with possibility, and all possibilitie...

[Anonymous No.3444086]

little prose I wrote in a moleskin while hiding from imaginary authorities in a side alley downtown whilst whacked out on shrooms and one too many edibles

>The night is loud and bright. I stumble, wounded, alongside the alley wall. Feet heavy, arms numb, brain panting like a jungle cat, there’s no time to lose; I can barely stand. My body’s beat, and its trashcan shuffle is making too much noise. Does it want the attention it’s so surely attracting? Does it know how much I don’t want that happening? I lean back. Slouched against the alley’s wall I lean back; peeling the dried tenement down with me, I fall.
From down here -- back pressed against the cold wet pavement -- I can see everything: the people, shadows slinking across the walls, flashing in then out of sight, and then back in again, trapped in the traffic lights rhythm; the small flocks of Rock Doves, joyfully sweeping every inch of this beaten alley with meek talons, and ashy beaks; the rickety mounds of brimming garbage bags, whose shapes change with the wind and the weather but whose insides are only ever altered in number; the fire escape staircases, which wind down the sides of cautiously occupied vacants, long rendered useless, one and all, by the disfigured ladder of the second to bottom, whose rungs lie, twisted and tied, beside my head; and the sky. The sky! The beautiful night sky. Lost behind all of the above yet still able to shine through, to me, pressed against the ground and finding it hard to breath, but alive and still able to see. Yes, my body is heavy, but my eyes are light. And I can see the night, but hopefully the night cannot see me.

[Anonymous No.3444898]

>>3444086
Wow, really dig that.

[Anonymous No.3444984]

>>3444086
I've read that at least once before.
People have already told you it's good.
Write some more.

[Anonymous No.3445006]

In adolescence, ------- had been at a loss: he was constantly told to be himself, but his most prominent characteristic was a propensity to mimic others. He worked subtly enough, not deigning to echo exact phrases or match an acquaintance in dress; nevertheless the presence of different groups brought different thoughts to his tongue, his temperament changing when met by a new crowd as if a colored filter was placed before him: he could see red and become the bull, see green and take the coveter’s place, green again and give himself to Mother Nature. But no matter how his appearance changed, the core remained untouched: marked by nervous diffidence, he sought the affections of others with a cloying yearning that kept his treasure out of reach.

Went a little colon-crazy as I was reading Jane Eyre at the time of writing this.

[Anonymous No.3445013]

A few stragglers walked on the street below under constant siege from the cold. It had almost won the battle of outdoors against the human inhabitants of the city, forcing them to retreat to indoors where they were then cornered. The power network was the only thing that kept the cold outside of the houses, powering the heating equipment inside them. The usual hum of city streets full of cars was barely audible. Most of the parked cars were covered in rime. Somewhere along the street came sounds of a struggling starter motor trying to wrestle the winter out of a car’s engine.

[Anonymous No.3445031]

Excerpt from a book I'm writing. I've got better stuff this is just a paragraph from the most recent chapter. My prose improves the more I write, going to have to draft multiple times when I finish.


Saturday night arrived and Casper was instructed to wait at his house, Jean was to meet him there and they would again embark into the unknown together. Casper sat outside the front of his house waiting, smoking a cigarette and playing with his silver lighter that he had stolen from an antique store when he was a child, like a crow he was attracted to its gleaming exterior. He occasionally looked up half heartedly to see if he could catch a glimpse of Alina entering her house, he hadn’t seen nor spoken to her since the last fateful night and he felt guilty. How quickly someone can come in and throw off the balance of your life, how quickly another can come in and repeat. Mulling over whether or not to go over to her house and see if she was home Casper pulled out another cigarette and lit up. The newsagent had run out of his preferred brand so he grabbed whatever he could get, they weren’t as smooth as his regulars nor as strong as Alina’s but the whole process felt mechanical and seemed to calm his nerves regardless. He decided he would get up and go over to Alina’s house if not only to see if she had forgotten him. He walked through his front yard, crossed over to hers, went up the front steps and was about to ring the doorbell when he was abruptly beckoned.

[Anonymous No.3445047]

After a quiet supper, which Ivor spectacularly scarfed down before anyone had finished their first slice of bread, Heilyn heard a familiar knock on the door. It was that of Rhys Lowarch, a childhood friend of Heilyn’s who had transitioned from an adventurous, almost comically troubled adolescent to a reticent, somewhat disturbed young man. In his soberness he rarely spoke, and when he freed himself enough to, the words that escaped were indifferent responses or poorly thought out shreds of artless pessimism. He had an uncharacteristic devotion and sentimentalism in regard to his close friends, and at times, when far lost in the darkest shadows of his distinct drunkenness, would express thoughts that could be considered the height of enlightenment for the time and place, and he would truly seem to be capable of being both a sage and an eccentric. Yet at the same time there lingered a doubt that he truly meant the words he was saying, and this doubt lingered stronger in him than even the more skeptical people whom he encountered. When sober, he apathetically submitted to anything demanded of him out of a fear that the world would callously reject him if he did otherwise. Naturally, he responded quite negatively to criticism, and his friends enjoyed taking light jabs at his insecurities, if only for his own good. These close friends, whom he devoted himself so much to, would never have dreamed of turning their backs on him, regardless of how much his state worsened.

[Anonymous No.3445050]

>>3445047
As people tend to do, they greatly appreciated his dedication. He was always available when one simply needed company, or someone to have a drink with (and there was no one on Gwawrwen’s back who was better to do so with) when everyone else insisted on a sober evening. He would never dream of acting bitter toward any of his friends, even when he felt insulted by something they said. Because of this fearful inoffensiveness, he could be almost aggravating to those spending extensive periods of time in his presence, yet all who knew him felt that he was a good person, or at least not a bad one, so there was no need to rattle him in any way. His pleasures were simple. He enjoyed company and intoxication, and would often knock on the doors of his friends, politely asking if they’d like to go to the Drinking Hole with him, or if not, to just sit on the shore for a bit. His plans were never any more precise than that, and tonight was no different.

[Anonymous No.3445059]

The NiNth Life

he is careful of dogs now:
he makes shorter leaps
and he stays on the inside,
when frost starts to creep

round the borders of windows.
he still walks the ledges
but nowadays two or three steps
from the edges.


The mice whom his forays
would terrify nightly
he just looks on and nods
as they pass him,
politely

When he dreams of the kitten
of eight lives before
he shudders, and takes
a slow stroll to the door

And I rise and assist him
out into the sun
and he shuffles along
where he once used to run

And I take shorter steps
and I take smaller breaths
and I want to inquire
about his other deaths

But he'd just raise an eyebrow
and look up to heaven
and say "I wouldn't worry
till you pass number seven."