Tigers of London
Max D’Ambrosio
Once, when we were riding our newly captured tigers
Down the drained bed of the Thames,
My best girl Methuseline told me
That London used to contain more people than tigers!
An absurd proposition, since it is clear
That though man may resist them, the beasts have always been
The dominant species of this desolate world,
Overgrown and blanketed as it is with the orange and black stalks
Of the tigerweed
Not to mention the armies of the Tigerlord Mountebank
Who, unlike the wild tigers we’re capable of catching,
Would never cave in
To the craven contrivances of humanity
To threats against captive kittens
Or even to the extract
Of the sacred nepeta plant
The Nip of Cats
Round which even the tigerweed dares not grow
But not out of fear of euphoric convulsions –
Such fatal temptation is resisted through respect
For their lord, and for his dread enforcer
The Weretiger
Who stalks the rooftops round Regent’s Park
A beast with the body of a tiger
And the pants of a man
There are no more domestic cats,
And no dogs of any kind, for obvious reasons
Not since the fall of Buckingham Fortress
The human stronghold of the Rebellion’s golden years
Now a mere mangled mess, and Mountebank’s mauling grounds
Marked by the masticated mountains of murdered men
And the mounted skulls of their massacred mutts and moggies
But a few feral strays have survived the Hobbesian feeding frenzy,
Hacked up like a hairball from the throat of war
Strong among cats of the past,
Weak among denizens of the ruins of London
A contradiction and a rarity, valued
For their tiger-like pheromones
Preyed upon, skinned, stripped of their most private glands
And worn as smelly, tiger-repelling armour,
Coarse, greasy curtains on a window looking in on
The weakness of mammalian hearts
But of course, Methuseline should’ve known all this already
Though she’s a spoiled child of the Post-Buckingham Baby Boom
Born two years after the traumatic and turbulent time
Of the Weretiger Tragedy
Which I tolerated as a toddler
In that time of terror, she might even have been killed
By her parents, just because
She had orange hair
Still, I expected her to know the ways of the world. After all,
We had just then returned from the Battle of Downing Street!
Yet her happy naiveté reminds me
Of myself, long ago, when I asked with wide eyes
“Mother, why don’t tigers let us ride them
When we aren’t wearing oily cat-skin jerkins?”
Meanwhile, my mother’s blue-ribbon tigress (whose name was Titania)
Shrugged off the spell, letting it slide
Off of her quizzically tilted head
As she overheard my careless words,
Embarrassment, rage, and a low growl rising
From her maw, which was muzzled
But not manacled and chained
Any tiger would kill to learn what she knew,
And she aimed to kill her way out of our camp,
But we managed to save ourselves
Soothingly stroking her stripes and
Sapping her savage self-importance
With the shaman’s latest potion
Filtered frappe of feminine feline follicles
And a spoonful of honeyed words
To help the medicine down
‘Til she was put down
By unanimous vote, bar one: my mother’s
For as I learned my lesson,
She unlearned hers
And I succeeded her as chieftain
Inheriting the resolve she lost
To Titania’s termination
So I tell my best girl Methuseline
As we trail off down the trench of the Thames:
Across the stratified, stripy tail of history
Such lessons repeat themselves
The Other reveal themselves
And neither side can be truly free
We find, in time, that the enemy
Can be tamed, transformed, temporarily
But won’t change their colours
Won’t cease to be
Orange and black and red all over
The Tigers of the Post-Apocalypse
The Tigers of London
No comments:
Post a Comment