Cat on a Mat and Other Poems

By Ken Gosse

Cat on a Mat

Have you ever had
that kind of a cat
who leaves a dead bird
on your welcome mat
and sometimes, perhaps,
a nasty dead rat?

He’s trying to tell you,
wherever you’re at,
“I love you, and though
I may be a bit fat,
I hope you love me.

Please keep feeding me.”

- Cat

His Doctoral Dissipation

Catachresis would tear at the heart of his thesis;
his hunger for words brought out slavish caprices.
Reviewers berated its difficult gleaning
as each word concurred but with some other meaning.
Apostrophes often implied aphaeresis.
A backbone so weak it would need arthrodesis.

His abstract rejected in thousands of pieces.

Trimming the Fat

What slashes you more
than the blade of a fencer
and hammers you more
than a football defenser?

What addles your brain
like a toddy dispenser
and gives you more pain
than a calf-muscle tensor?

What smashes more words
than a digest condenser
whose mystical powers
grow ever immenser?

The talents required
by an author’s extensor:
the runcible wiles
of an editor’s censor.

An Enigma Wrapped in Ridicule

a Fibonacci poem

Two
roads
diverged
in a wood;
with intentions good,
I took just one—that’s all I could.
Someday hence, with a sigh, many who are passing by
will recite and proclaim, by and by, that it made a difference—and that they know why!
Whichever path my footsteps trip, I might end up like good old Rip, asleep where’er I chose to lie—an enigma, laughed at by passers by.

Words of a Feather

Soft rhymes with oft’
and heather with feather—
they make a nice verse
if you put them together.

Quite often you’ll soften
fierce storms at the time
if you use the right words,
blending verses with rhyme

and perhaps someone there
in the dark of despair
will find cause to elope
with the joy we call hope.

Ken Gosse usually writes short, rhymed verse using whimsy and humor in traditional meters. First published in First Literary Review–East in November 2016, since then in The Offbeat, Pure Slush, Parody, Home Planet News Online, Sparks of Calliope and others. Raised in the Chicago, Illinois, suburbs, now retired, he and his wife have lived in Mesa, AZ, over twenty years.