The Table Cat

[billy]

thanks duke, all worthy of using in the edit. [except the ginger tippito name thing.] i call him ginger everyone else calls him tippitoe. it's got to the point as you say when he ignores both names

The Table Cat

Ginger's on the desk, curled
between our sound systems main speaker
and the wife's faux-leather handbag.

His tail-tip spasms and swings
like a horse hair fly swatter
but slower, felinely.

The rest of Tippitoe is corpse-like,
though there's a slight rise and fall
of a fat belly under marmalade fur.

Pink pads on his paws are slightly pinker
that the skin of a barbie doll
with claws like barbless fishing hooks.

My chair; scarred like a scratching post
is covered in an old coat, a light one
with a tattered hemline and slit wrists.

The closed eyes and flat head;
(it's pressed against the plastic)
belies his alertness,

When I lean over to look at him he opens
one bleary eye, I feel I'm being judged
like some irritating Jehovah's Witness.

In mild critique, "sound systems" in L2 tweaked my consistency hobgoblin - shouldn't there be an apostrophe somewhere in "systems?"  The wife (also possessive) got one, after all.

Same with the cat's name:  is it "Ginger" or "Tippitoe?"  No doubt the individual in question answers to either, to the extent that a cat answers as opposed to deigning to take notice.

My only other firm critique is to suggest a semicolon in the second-to-last line (replacing the colon between "eye" and "I").

Many nice phrases - "belies his alertness" is nice.  So is "slit wrists" of the old coat.

Oh, alright, one more:  if Tippitoe is capitalized, why not Barbie™?

A pleasant domestic scene.