Cheshire Cat Poem by Windsor Guadalupe Jr

This lad,
Iron-clad,
Was once a lovely
Dash of virility
But they have siphoned him.

They have transported
The Sun to his veins
Such a summer raze
And the moon,
They forever hoisted it
Into the firmaments.

They have passed him on
To tigers,
To the lions,
To the arachnids
With the air of macabre.

The rain pared him
Like a fresh pulp
From a prolix garden.
And they jeered
The ghastly mimicry
He was an unsightly child.

The Gods promised him
The afterlife,
But death wants more death.
He wrote
It on a piece of brambly paper
That carried the scent of
The plenitude of machine-like
Nuisances
His fidgety hand gave a stern thrust
To the slender pen and wrote:

We are all dead in here.
And he was right.

One lady saw it,
Who, in her knapsack
Contained a whole flourish
Of obsequiousness.
And he was instructed
To keep wallflowers,
Dust from a moth’s wings,
Coins, pennies,
Heck, even surfeit threads
From a battered clothing.
And she took him to an alley,
And there, the lady said
Stay here, this is a safe place.
And she left,
And the boy kept tinkering
With his nebulous collection
Of wallflowers, dust,
Coins and threads
And he tethered them one by one
Until a Cheshire cat
With a Cheshire cat’s sinister grin
Lunged at him
And torn him to pieces,
Stole his collection of petty things
And left him there, lifeless
At a murky alley,10: 19 in the evening.

The Cheshire Cat purred
And held the boy’s pen with a taut
And wrote
He used to be a lovely boy,
And stitched the note
On the boy’s chest.