The Scotsman Sessions #388: Michael Pedersen

Scotsman Sessions  The Scotsman Sessions #388: Michael Pedersen

Transcript

00:00 Hello, I'm Michael Peterson and this is my poem The Cat Prince. It harks back to a time

00:14 I was convinced I was in fact more cat than human child, that is more feline than boy.

00:20 On those playdates away that my mum willed into existence, I would insist on fully derobing,

00:27 dark bollock naked, declaring myself the Cat Prince, then proceeding to pound around these

00:33 strangers' households trying to recruit their children into my naked cat gang. This did

00:39 not make for too many sequel playdates. For those that somehow did come to fruition, fuck

00:44 knows how, they came with the qualification, the caveat, I did not once more become the

00:49 Cat Prince. To everybody's utter dismay and incredulity, this very rarely deterred me,

00:56 and the Cat Prince hung around for years longer than everyone anticipated, in some ways his

01:02 back stronger than ever.

01:08 The Cat Prince

01:09 I am the Cat Prince, I declare, already on all fours, already balls naked, in the house

01:20 of hasty, where there's Adam hasty, Daniel, and me, the Cat Prince. We're boyhood budbers,

01:28 twelve years of silliness. Adam laughs, frantic gas, guffaws, then pegs it to his bedroom

01:35 anticipating the chase. Daniel, wavering, between cat and laddie, compagnero and fugitive,

01:44 succumbs to the Gnostic glamour, strips for a full feline transformation, down to our

01:52 little furs, little bloods, ready to bringe past the chide of absent classmates who might

01:59 well hear of this and smite us with shame. For we are cuddle kings, hankering for Adam's

02:08 adulation, oh moggy, moxy, we embrace the cat life, vow inurement to the side effects.

02:17 Carpet burns, windlash pimpling, the sacrifice of language in each falsetto yowl, as hunters

02:26 we're tasked by the creator, our gaze, a crosshair, our pounce, a ripple of bravura. Who else

02:34 so guilefully stalks sunbeams? We do well here. It's those damn cats again! The neighbours

02:41 would allow 'em to yawp as I race by, with a robin red breast between my jaws, and Daniel

02:48 finish shitting in their rhubarb patch. It's convenient not to think of the killer in us,

02:55 assassin still, holding back our purr. As we coil our new cat bodies to a spring, Adam

03:03 clambers, feart, atop the bed. What happens next is louder than we hoped for. Adam's mum,

03:12 startled by this cacophony, arrives, then screams, curtailing the playdate. Later that

03:19 night, she calls my mum concerned, though my mum never mentions this. I can only assume

03:26 she was wise to it. The mephos, the hieroglyphs, fathomed we'd soon meet the type of trouble

03:33 that can really shake boys down. Long days, when the teeth tear it out of us, and the

03:38 claws don't stop coming. But not yet, I hear her whisper, not without this moment's orchestra

03:44 of feeling. As a boy, I was whiskerless, weighed down by the nest of knots squat in my belly.

03:53 As a cat, I was so much more. Of course, as mother to the cat prince, she knew all this.

04:09 [Music]