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Black Cat Moan - After The Spirit of Glenn Hughes' Song
Written: July 18, 2026, for a contest sponsored by Robert James Liguori
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The night did not arrive—
it sashayed, ash-lashed, through a lattice of rain,
its ochre pulse swallowing the last citrine ember
until every window became an unwritten maxim.
A black cat crossed my breathing.
Not omen—
but augury wearing velvet,
its eyes twin kyanite wounds
where forgotten constellations
still quaffed the first astonishment of fire.
Something older than memory
stirred.
Not memory—
phantosmia;
the scent of vanished summers,
of hydrangea bending beneath thunder,
of bruised peonies surrendering
their magenta music
to a patient earth.
Grief is never singular.
It arrives as an Ouroboros—
fur becoming shadow,
shadow becoming silence,
silence becoming my own name
spoken by no living mouth.
I called it loneliness.
The darkness laughed,
refusing the epithet.
Its voice was mellifluous ruin,
a lapidary hymn
chiseling adamantine fractures
through the sanctuary
I mistook for certainty.
There, beneath the ribs,
a maelstrom gathered.
Not violent—
merely sapient enough
to understand that every heart
must someday become
its own abandoned house.
The black cat waited.
No sermon.
No harangue.
No wanton prophecy.
Only the sedate ordinance
of yellow eyes
holding mine
until fear forgot its language.
How strange—
that salvation should wear whiskers,
should tinker with broken breathing,
should carry no halo,
only impeccable hunger.
Its tail wrote calligraphy
across the wind.
Each curve
a salient syllable.
Each step
an inviolate measure.
Each pause
a lesson no scriptorium
ever preserved.
I followed.
Through rust,
through patina,
through the abysm
beneath ordinary hours.
The moon hung as
an unfinished confession.
Even the stars
seemed reluctant
to bloviate
their inherited brilliance.
Silence
needed no audience.
Then—
the animal vanished,
yet something remained:
a single black hair
caught upon my sleeve,
slender as a pinion,
light as an unanswered prayer.
I understood.
The creature
had never crossed my path.
It crossed
the barricade
between the self I rehearsed
and the self
still unoriginate—
impregnable only because
it had never dared
to love the wound.
Now,
whenever midnight
loosens its dark swathe
across the sleeping earth,
I no longer mistake
the distant moan
for sorrow.
It is Catharsis,
low and slow,
the hidden animal
inside every soul
calling itself home
through an incandescent ache
terrible,
chordless chorus
of separate solitudes
of being alive.
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