I wouldn't sail this ship if I were you
Behold this drooling, snoring cat!
All snuggly sat upon my lap.
This purring, petted bag of fur,
This connoisseur of hug and nap.
Her hoary form is far from svelte,
Her scruffy pelt is wearing thin.
Behold, such domesticity,
Her days of roaming free all done!
And would you call her, on first glance,
A veteran of chance and scrape
As, heedless of my epithets,
She slyly lets a fart escape?
Yet in her time she ruled the sea,
A prodigy of salt and storm!
Who knows how many men she drowned,
This fury bound in feline form?
They say she studied piracy
As by the sea, in kittenhood,
She saw a score of feline foes
Assuage their woes as pirates could;
Her mind was keen, her claws were good;
She thought she could defeat them all;
She sought the pirates in their dens
And fiercely then she yowled this call:
“Join me or die, ye flea-flecked cads!”
And soon she had (from those not dead)
A cat-boat with a cutthroat crew,
As through the realm the rumour spread:
“Beware the queen who rules the waves,
Enslaves the humans whom she meets
And paws them up at 5 a.m.
To summon them to bring her treats!”
And oh, what terrors she dispersed
To all who cursed her years afloat!
The scourge of scurvy sea-swept dogs
Whose epilogues in blood she wrote;
The scourge of sleepy piratekind
Who’d wake to find their treasure gone;
The scourge of undiscovered lands
Whose unspoilt sands she shat upon.
They say she once, when feeling bored,
Made war toward the Mouse-King’s halls,
And all victorious, she stole
His underlings for cannonballs -
And how the mouse-king loudly wailed
And quailed before her unsheathed claws
As from the cannon’s mouth his hordes
Were launched towards the tropopause!
And on an archipelago
Where South winds blow all summer-sweet,
She kept a troupe of eager Toms
Who with aplomb her joyous heat
Attended to; and as she lay
All sunlight-splayed and satisfied,
They rolled in catnip on the shore
And swore they’d serve her ‘til they died.
The end? The ship by Blackbeard sunk
As she lay drunk; the boat’s capsize;
Her fearsome crew all forced to scatter,
Pitter-patter counterwise.
Until, rainswept and woebegone,
She caused some consternation when,
Escaped from Blackbeard’s Oubliette,
She asked to get back in again.
So though for seas to soothe her soul
Her water-bowl must now suffice,
Who knows what recollections strut
Behind her shut and sleeping eyes?
Where seated on a silver throne
On pirate-flesh alone she dines
With blood-red wines, and in her dreams
Are quinqueremes and barquentines.
