The Cat's Meow, a poem by T.E. Maltba at Spillwords.com

The Cat’s Meow

The Cat’s Meow

written by: T.E. Maltba

 

Open-palmed and calloused,
Stooped levitation with elastic pouched poison
And smoldering torch in hand.
Diffusion, yellow-bellied,
Like scalding black blood once sipped to revitalize,
The sparrow’s compass doesn’t point north.
No more effaced than steamed spectacles
Of midnight’s self-avoiding random walk,
A bathroom noise.

Memoryless skull
Coaxed from orbit, a portal’s genesis
Masquerading in supernoval afterbirth,
Encompassing space-time fucked like a wet warped
Clock swirlingly sucked into a dark tub drain.
Stardusted sphere of the abyss,
Past perception different yet the same,
Homeomorphic to the conception of the present day,
Continuously deformed in topology of collectivism.

Angel hair
Plucked to garnish the cosmic soup,
A feeding frenzy, bombardment in a brownian brain.
Haven? Or entramemeled matrix?
The house of rickety junctions and transmissive trusses,
Lines primed for whispers—a tempest.
Paradox, or is it?
There’s structure regardless—
Sticky flows of coalesced cognition.

Dissociation at bay
Only by her surveilling eye and phantomed
Telescoping through the leaden looking glass.
The door’s ghostly keyhole,
Interdimensional lens for kaleidoscoping
White-washed walls and ticking metronome.
Venous ballet red-rhythmed and haloed—
Synchronized. Purveyor of song or silence?
It’s only as quiet as the cat’s meow.

Her translucent notes linger
Like balloons’ descent before the storm,
Elixired harmonics and still echoes
Of a dead sea’s metamorphosis.
The architect’s gaze onto blurred blueprints
Through existential haze—
Fogging
Felicity
Emergence.

T.E. Maltba

T.E. Maltba

T.E. Maltba is a statistics Ph.D. candidate at U.C. Berkeley whose research lies at the intersection of machine learning and random dynamics. His working poetry collection Beyond Reason documents his experience with research, relationships, Asperger’s syndrome, mental health, and substance abuse. His work has been featured by Spillwords Press and Spectrum Publishing.
T.E. Maltba

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