Extended Magic Cat Metaphor
Once you disassemble it
it’s all fucked up.
Turns out just
despair held it together.
Blinky the magic cat
laid sweets —
paper-wrapped,
coloured or plain,
familiar or unknown
like eggs for years,
then one day
Blinky broke:
Victorian earthenware.
Child lurched, or
Blinky’s spirit
moved. One shudder,
one ectoplasmic
ripple and nothing
ever went back.
Ten years
from break to mend.
Even glue only works
where the pieces can
touch each other.
After all this business
three weeks lying in bed
I got up one day
and moved the bed
across the room,
ghost that I am
—just like that—
who can barely move myself.
Now it’s just the phantom
pains. The opposite
of that Japanese
gold repair thing:
kintsugi. Who has gold
anyway? I have to
live with it, darling.
So Blinky
in the kitchen
surveys me in my
solitude, light streaming
through his cracks.
Katy Evans-Bush is a poet, blogger and essayist. Her latest book is Forgive the Language (Penned in the Margins). She lives in Kent where she is a freelance poetry tutor and editor. katyevansbush.com