I’m A Bad Man, A Sorry Man, A Real Son-of-a-Bitch

I have a kitten I tried to kill

She was crying loud enough to drive me crazy and her sister was in the guest bedroom crying just as loud, so I figured I’d leave the second kitten out in the storm

The momma cat was also screaming for somebody to do something

She was a bad cat, carried a knife or maybe a gun, and everybody in the neighborhood stayed away from her

And now she was up on the house next door and she’d had a litter of five kittens in a crawl space big enough for thread and two of the kittens dropped through a big Ficus tree and fell into my yard

I got the first one in, but then the second one fell and I couldn’t bear to chase her down, don’t ask me why, I just figured those two kittens were more than I could handle

The rain came down harder and the thunder was loud enough to go to war and it got cold and soon enough the second kitten stopped crying and so did the mother and I figured the kitten had died

In the morning I found the second kitten at the base of a tree and I thought she was dead and I felt very bad, but I got closer and could tell she was barely breathing

I brought her inside and fed her with an eye dropper and the first kitty licked her dry

They lay together on my bed and slowly the dead kitty came back to life and so I named the first kitty Birdy, since she had dropped from a tree, and the second, I named Stormy for obvious reasons

They’re two months old now and the other three kittens died the night in the storm, a maid found them on the roof the next morning

The momma cat is still hanging around and she comes to my wall and sings a death song directed at me and I guess she is looking to drop some more kittens into somebody’s yard

If it’s my yard, I think I’ll just burn my house down and leave town

It’s preferable to suicide

I’ll take Birdy and Stormy with me though, since both of them love me, even though I’m a bad man, but I didn’t understand that two kittens were better than one

I never knew that until now

The night Stormy forgave me she tried to get her head into my mouth … and so now, I’m seeing life through the eyes of kittens, it’s cotton balls and Olympic athletes, squeaky voices and blood on my back, rollercoasters and waking up with them biting my toes

Love can heal most anything, even in the crazy world shared by kitten and man

I know since I’d die for these kittens (they will always be kittens to me) and someday I will