The Poetry Society

The cats here are lean, step warily;

streets tilt their cobbles at a scalded sky,

slipways for the launching sun.

Cats duck the glare of white walls,

circle outer-edges, frontiers of scent, history's

invisible palisades.

Anonymous, we brush the limits

of language's sea-worthiness or purpose,

the simple numbness of hot stone.

Cats stroll to waste-bins, finnick

the mercurial rot of sardine heads,

their stink a gauze of denser air.

Cats outstare the day's exclusion zone,

watch swifts air-blade terracotta roofs

in a blurred heat-haze of wings.