Meet the Cat: A Poetic Journey

Fourscore and seven years ago (or thereabouts), a friend and I took our relationship to the next level by cohabitating with one another. This allowed The Roommate and I to save money, rent together, and amalgamate our insanely cute household decorations into one sickeningly Martha-Stewart-esque living space for the little time we both have left before we are, in a fit of passion and perfection, rapidly stolen off the market of eligible single young ladies by some handsome suitor or other. So, as you can see, my living situation was suddenly a win-win situation. Until I remember that, along with gaining The Roommate (and all of her baking apparatuses), I would also be gaining Lucy.
Oh, Lucy. Lucille. Lucifer. Her name comes from the Latin word for light, which is fairly ironic since she is actually the grim shadow haunting this apartment--and my entire life, for the time being. For months I was tormented by this shadow--it would beckon at my door in the early hours of the morning. It would mysteriously make food disappear as only a food addict can. It would do odd things like sleep with one claw stretched under my doorway just in case I woke up and there was the remote possibility I would be in range to claw. Also, the shadow would occasionally pounce on the water in the toilet bowl, or whatever else happened to be in it (we've never figured this out). But after extensive therapy, I was told I needed to start getting my feelings out there.

Only, I wasn't sure where to start venting my hidden subconscious ailments that had built up in the short months with the Roommate and her domesticated beast.I struggled to really find the right words to sum up everything that Lucy truly is. For days, nay months, nay ... For hours I slaved over parchment and fountain pen, filling up page after papyrus page only to shake my head vehemently and cast them into the flames with a flick of my diamond-studded fingers (flames of a victorian fire place, mind you, not the ones smoldering from Lucy's picture up top). For a long time, it seemed that no words, no pen of man, no pages of trees, no claws of cats could contain Lucy--and not surprisingly, given her startling body-fat percentage.

The MA of German Literature in me began to suspect that this was not a job for prose, my friends,  but for poetry. Brevity, dear souls, is the zest of wit. But even this proved to be not without its own pitfalls...

I began with a haiku, which I now term Haiku #1. But when I said brevity before, seventeen syllables is not what I had in mind.Trying to fit the bane of your entire existence into that amount of space is like... I don't know, it's like what Lucy's mom probably felt upon delivery or something.

Lucy, Lucifer
The Roommate seems to love you
Wherefore I don't know.

haiku #2 followed close on the heels:

The Roommate has this cat
It may just be a cow
But I am not sure.

It didn't take me long to realize haikus were not the way to go. It is hard to fit Lucy into her litter box, let alone three short lines. I vaguely remembered learning about limericks in elementary school, so I decided to give it a go:

There is this ol' cat whom I live with
She could be a dairy cow's hind width
has white hair and spots
and moos lots and lots
but has no udders to milk with.

Now I was getting somewhere. But aside from the poetic progress being made, I still felt I had only scratched the surface of my experience living with Lucy. The limerick had been the sort of gate that opened to the torrential flood of my troubling feelings and inner turmoil that IS life with lucy (which was, incidentally, my first idea for the title of this blog). As the feelings of rage and despair began to flow freely, I cycled through poetic genre after poetic genre like a honey bee flitting from flower to flower.

Lucy from the first day I saw you
you and your little crossed-eyes, too

I thought how glad I was you weren't mine
because then my life wouldn't be fine

but when the I and the Roommate
decided to cohabitate

I had forgotten you'd be there
until it was TOO LATE. :-(


I knew this was getting out of control, I needed stability. I needed groundedness. I needed... An acrostic.

L- arge
U- gly (or... perhaps "umpteenth" which is how many times I usually have to tell her not to do stupid things before my words seem to make any sense to her).
Now, the C was hard at first... So I waited for the muses momentarily and moved on to Y.
Y-ack-like.
Oh, now I know. C is for "Cross-eyed." Lucy is definitely cross-eyed--not because of any birth deformity, but because she has never learned how to stare at things farther than 3 inches from her pupils.

Now, when I first moved in with the Roommate, I had come to the preliminary conclusion that Lucy's full name was Lucille. (I would later discover on my own that Lucy's full name is actually Lucifer, but I was naive in those early days.) So I decided to expand upon my accrostic to really emphasize some key points:
L- arge
U- gly
C- ross-eyed
I- rritating
L- arge
L- arge
E- xistent (which is an ironic twist I decided to add at the end for literary flair, since it actually describes the opposite of what I wish Lucy would be.)

But alas, this poetic journey was ultimately an exercise in existential futility. I had cycled through the vast, heavenly realms of poetry and come up with no real way to fully describe Lucy, her devastating impact on my life, the Roommate's codependence on her, nor the colorful happenings of our humble little dwelling. For many days I mourned the way that the most horrendous things in life simply elude articulation. Until, one night I awoke to the sound of Lucy meowing (more like "moo-ing") at my bedroom door. And I knew there was only one poetic genre truly worthy of encapsulating my life, trapped as it is by this whole crazed cat-cow debacle...

And that genre is, of course, a blog. Welcome to Randumb Acts of Lucy.