In the tremulous streets, past the paupers and pimps, I sauntered, dandy and lithe: no battle fang had scorched my sheath – no pointed paw had split the skin. For the yellow hue of the bulbs above, I felt grateful: grateful even to what dread Hand hurled me into this grimy place: – Montmartre, la butte, where many like me roam – more yet perhaps than the two-legged chimps – and the food, live and small, squeaks in the nooks and corners. Complacent, fabulating, I let my mind wander, my downy fur float.
Stealing through the rue du Vieux-Colombier, I stopped under my plaque: ‘Arthur Rimbaud vécut ci-haut’.
Underneath, in the smouldering bags of untended black junk, my mother had, two moons ago, birthed a teeming red litter. My brothers were drowned: I, the last, had escaped. Tumescent, she, with her last dying purr, had given me the name of that enfant terrible.
