Photo by purpledawn on Pixabay

“Are you even listening?”
“Why are you staring at the ceiling? Pay attention.”
“What are you thinking about?”

These questions have lost all meaning to me.
No longer questions, but demands.

Demands that I cannot fulfill.

No matter where, and no matter when,
my thoughts trail behind me like a stray cat.

Sometimes it has claws.

It’s meowing constantly echoes inside my head.
I’ve tried countless times to drown it out,

but music is it’s catnip.

Sometimes it brings me “gifts”.
Ideas too broad to be put on paper.

I think I’d prefer a dead mouse instead.

The questions people ask come from an inability to hear the meowing
or see the claw marks
or feel the bristling fur
rubbing on their legs everywhere they go.

But when they do finally take notice,
the cat strikes.

And I am isolated

once again.

 

Words from the Author – Ava Sancrant

I wrote this poem about my thoughts. Not so much the thoughts themselves, but the way they affect me. The thing with me is that I never stop thinking. My mind is always doing something, whether I’m at school, trying to draw or write, or trying to sleep. I decided to theme my poem around cats, since I have four at home who are all always following me around, meowing, and demanding to be held and/or pet, much like the way I depicted my thoughts in this poem.

Revision Decision:

Originally this poem had a completely different theme. It had clouds instead of cats, which I didn’t think really flowed well, so I rewrote the whole thing. Also, it’s a lot easier to compare my thoughts with the behavior of a cat rather than a cloud, since clouds don’t really do much.