the carpet is no longer intertwined with your fur,

a gentle white no longer imbued beside a rough gray wool

now it is only the air that skims by my ankles,

caressing the unshaven hair that once brushed beside your whiskers,

as time continues its inevitable prowl across the universe

one of us journeys on, clinging to the future’s fingertips

whilst the other lays in untouched ash

a victim claimed to the choke of the past

but you must know, looking down from heaven’s crown,

that the sun still awaits to greet you in the early noon

to shine its brilliant rays against your coat of snow

melting you in its embrace as you colorfully welcomed it,

and the birds still chirp for you, singing your name,

taunting the glass of the window as the cicadas laugh

a harsh buzz that never quite pleased your keen ears,

and the ghosts must know i miss you, the tricksters they can be,

as the supple steps of your paws echo in the stairwell, a sound that is not your doing,

but even so, the anticipation of your piercing cry towers over my heart

never crashing yet always building, for how can something unreal become destroyed,

and that’s when i think of your kindness,

how you must have spoken the human language so fluently,

scratching on a door as if a knock, a question to bask in the presence of another

purring as if to say hello, a greeting to a pair of shoes you had never before smelled

nudging the food bowl as if to share, a meal intended to be split between two

even as warm tears leak down my cheeks, their heat does not compare to yours

not the warm kiss that mother nature had planted atop your pink nose,

and this world of new, does not compare to the one of old,

a life that now too rests in ash, and all that remains

is whatever dust memories are made of.