PROMPT: Pet

Daily writing prompt
What is good about having a pet?

It’s a friend who may not understand what you’re going through, but who will never talk… and sometimes eagerly helps with the digging when you’re burying the body. Try finding a human friend like that.

PERU LIMERICK

There was a Guinea Pig from Peru
who didn’t know just quite what to do.
He’d heard there were places
-- oh, so magical places –
where his kind lived as pets not as food.

PROMPT: Dogs or Cats?

Daily writing prompt
Dogs or cats?

Who would win in an interspecies death match? That’s a tough one. Dogs obviously have size and pack-fighting coordination, but cats are duplicitous, excel at the sneak attack, and are not constrained by moral conventions. (They’ll push things off the counter just to see them fall.) So, I doubt we’ll ever know.

Bookstore Cat [Senryū]

bookstore cat
sleeps soundly on a book
about dogs.

One Eye [Senryū]

cat stares
through one good eye,
like a bond villain.

PROMPT: Pet Tricks

If you could make your pet understand one thing, what would it be?

Partial differential equations. First of all, then it could explain them to me. Secondly, I could completely demoralize all the Westminster types who think they have “smart dogs.”

PROMPT: Favorite Animal

Daily writing prompt
What is your favorite animal?

I’m not sure whether the intention is to determine one’s favorite species of animal or one’s favorite particular individual animal. I’ll presume the former as the latter would turn it into a “Which of your pets (or children — for those who count humans among the animal kingdom) do you love best?” type of question — which is awkward to ask anyone with whom one is not on intimate terms.

At any rate, I’ve come to think of assigning favorites as a bad habit of lazy minds, intended to negate the need to actively observe and to see the beauty and brilliance of whatever stands before one at any given moment. [It’s part of a vast array of patterns people develop to be as cognitively disengaged as can be managed.] So, I don’t have a favorite species of animal, but aardvark does come first in the dictionary, if not in my heart.

[Incidentally, when I had multiple pets, I did have a favorite, and — perhaps tellingly — it was the one whose personality was least like my own.]

Combative Kittens [Senryū]

three lil kittens
rotate through one-on-one
combat — tag-team style.

Cat [Lyric Poem]

Seems wrong to call cat ladies crazy;
It's the perfect pet for the lazy.
Put out some food, water, and a box,
And sit back and be crazy like a fox.

Dog [Lyric Poem]

We are fond of calling him "Man's Best Friend,"
What would he call us, if it were he who penned?
I wonder, would he have stayed at our feet,
Had we not mastered the grilling of meat?