Being Cat
First of all, you can’t think clearly:
illogic the permanent eclipse of your dark mind;
cause and effect as distantly unconnected
as, say, Coventry and Calvary.
In your field there are no Venn diagrams,
and if all men are mortal, and Plato
is a man, nothing is entailed
or whatever is, is so only to be chased,
caught and crunched without abstraction.
Next, and relatedly, you eschew grammar:
neither verb nor noun, tense or person,
definite or indefinite article, let alone
bound anaphora or clause, has any purchase.
You spring beyond the fence of sentences
so the cutting edge of your vocalisations
shows me how the world you live in
is not mine, or yours; your only possessives
marked with a hiss and an arch.
And to conclude, you kill everywhere
and everything, and pass with a clean heart
as if you were to wade through a sea of blood
and walk out purer than the Christ.
Having no soul makes you weightless:
it is not just that History has not happened,
but that you as an ‘I’ have not happened,
and that naked fact, if nothing else,
gives to me, where I sit unreflected in your eyes,
pause and catalyst for thought.
Terry Jones‘ poems have appeared in a range of magazines, including The New Statesman, Poetry Review, Agenda, Ambit, Magma, Iota, Envoi, The London Magazine and others. In 2011 he took 1st prize in the Bridport poetry competition. Poetry Salzburg published his first short collection, Furious Resonance in 2011.