(aka "The Leftovers")

This piece took me a long time and a lot of effort to get to the point, where I felt even remotely comfortable sharing it. This is also the closest I get these days to trying to write love poetry. As I've previously said, increasing age and experience has shown me that over 90% of attempts at love poetry tend to turn out in various shades of awful, from unintentionally funny to excruciatingly bad with no redeeming features, whatsoever.

That said, however, this piece is a rather different bird altogether.

To start with, it gains its inspiration and major influences from  Mulefoot's ongoing, adult-rated Furry comic SLOP. Over the past several years, I have been privileged to help Mulefoot to flesh out some of the background information, species and secondary character stories for many parts of the unique and compelling world, which he has created.

One of these concerns a character who will be important in an upcoming story line, namely a former kitten actor named Tawny Two-Trees, who is a Klandagh (which is the anthropomorphic equivalent to a cougar in the SLOPverse). Now, as this piece isn't directly about him, it doesn't contain any story spoilers, either for the mainline SLOP comic, or for any of the (also upcoming) fiction background and companion stories.

This, instead comes from the story of Tawny's littermate brother Dusty Two-Trees, who was left behind on the Reservation, when Tawny was taken away to Hollywood and made into a star, mainly because Dusty was not as 'cute' and telegenic as his brother was.

Unfortunately for Dusty, things do not go well for him, and eventually he finds himself an orphan being shoved into a brutal group home, from which he eventually runs away. He lives rough in forests and farmlands, attempting to hunt for his needs, and eventually he meets someone, who turns out to be far worse-off than he is.

Dusty's tale is told in a short story called "Under the Birches", which may eventually be posted, after I subject it to a few more brutal rounds of editing. In the mean-time, this is a piece of companion poetry, which gives some broad-stroke outlines of the plot, specifically on how Dusty meets and eventually falls in love with another runaway orphan kitten, who becomes his mate.

She has been on her own for long enough, that some of her language skills have regressed, and at least in the early stages of the story, Dusty never gets a clear answer out of her as to what her name is. In the early stages, she mostly communicates with him via clipped, three or four-word sentences, as well as a lot of the more 'natural' cougar vocalisations, such as hisses, growls, snarls, meows and purrs.

But as Dusty eventually finds out, she is far from unintelligent, and can make her thoughts known just fine, even if she has to re-learn how to do it in standard language.

This piece (as well as the longer story), also takes no small measure of inspiration from Joni Mitchell's song Urge for Going, which I have always felt is some of the most gorgeous poetry she ever wrote.

I'm still not 100% satisfied with this, and it may eventually be edited still further, but for now, I thought it was OK to share.