String Theory
My cats won’t play with static toys:
they have to be balletic, with a puppeteer of human hands
to make a plain string dance.
The game becomes a battle, not of cat v string,
but of feline versus human
in multiple dimensions.
A flurry of movement, fur and claw,
is everything, a moment of release,
the creation of a wake
in which the instigator meets his shadow,
thrown in twisting, complex shapes,
outwitted by the light.
We all meet here, chasing our tails,
never quite seeing the point
but knowing how it moves, and will move on.
David Van-Cauter is a personal tutor and editor from Hitchin, Herts.In 2017 he was runner-up in the Bradford on Avon festival competition and highly commended in the Bare Fiction competition. He was shortlisted for the last IS&T Cafe Writers Commission.