Cat Pack For AEM

                                 Cat Pack Portraits by Sara Drake-Wain

On the occasion of Anne Elizabeth Moore's birthday month, Sara Drake and I hatched together a gift cat pack inspired by Sara's currently gestating comics biography of Louis Wain and Anne's two kit-kats. Sara painted these frisky portraits of Thurber and All Girl Metal Band while I wrote them honorific poems - Thurber's details his careening addiction to catnip while All Girl Metal Band's is an eponymous investigation into the world of discrimination and metal show flyers. The poems may be read after "the jump."


All Girl Metal Band

The promoter’s poster for the big show
that was trying to get all the coolest cats to go
said less about the band’s sound and hometown area
and much, much more about the touring puss’s genitalia

Their description wasn’t the one they had asked:
“Satan-exalting riffs that are faster than you can possibly understand.”
It was:
“Dude, it’s an all girl metal band!”

But a certain young kit-kat
- a precocious chat at that -
(one like you never knew, she’d stage dive while soloing and slam dance into you
(all without going the slightest bit out of tune))
held the promoter’s line as a badge of pride:

“Yes, we are an all girl metal band,
and yes, your ears will be fried.”

All the tom cats in the audience
were not sure exactly what to do,
they stared on while saying:

“Man - she rips.
I mean, like, for a girl, dude.”


Thurber

A mouser with his owner away like that
is less concerned with appearances than your average house cat

In truth,
it’s not too uncouth,
for a kit-kat to develop a lil’ nip tooth

Spending all day,
cooped up with no play,
understandably leads to indulging like a Mr. Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde may understand,
but James Thurber is less rabid a fan,*
yet his namesake still gobbles up just as much nip as he can

(Then meows “Stick it to the man, man.”)

* More of a drunkard, really, than a herbal dapper Dan.