Lifestyle Features

Pipe-hittin’ kitten, emblem of the new Britain

Could be verse: poetry ripped from the headlines

By JAMES PARKER | September 12, 2007

Lines upon seeing a photograph of the troubled English rock star Pete Doherty apparently administering a dose of crack to his pet cat

Curtainless window, 5 am: night clings to the ledge
with whitening fingernails, and I am a cat on crack.
Prickle-whiskered, nostrils carved in smoke,
fur all spikes, a strangely mangy bug-eyed stickleback . . .
No meow — not now — just a goblin croak.
Pete? He’s a treat. Before my teeth fell out
I wrote his last album.

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