On going to a 'Cat Cafe'

Mog on the Tyne

“It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat

— and it is best not to exist at all.” - H. P. Lovecraft

I.

Eerie disquiet

dawns

in cartoon revelation

as you find yourself, hungover

in the twinkling sugar

of a cat café.

A sense that, maybe

this is how it ends.

II.

Cathected kittyscape  /// scratchposts

 from where

furred sentinels condescend

to share a yawn

or malign pundits

with a look of distanced pity;

token crumb

of begrudged acknowledgement.

The heavy-handed Lennys are out again.

Here, eat my scowl.

Cats perfect rejection

as a poised art

with the same investment

that dogs so artlessly accept

the heels, leash and stick of anyone;

indiscriminately faithful

where the cat so discriminatingly departs

– tail up, aloof.

To be rejected by a cat

in a cat café is

a fair and fitting punishment

            for going to a cat café.

            You are here, I am here –

            sitting in a cat café

III.

People want this.

The world's first cat café, Cat Flower Garden (貓花園) opened its doors in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1998. From 2005 to 2010, seventy-nine cat cafés opened across Japan. Some sources suggest that a feline-friendly establishment opened in Vienna, 1912, to assure Austria’s place in the history of the cat café as something of a vanguard. These same sources, not entirely limited to but nonetheless available via the solid reliability of Wikipidea, claim that Vlladamir Lenin was a regular customer at this Austrian café, during a period of exile in 1913. Cats can be a calming influence, especially when aspiring to liberate the proletariat. In 2014 Lady Dinah's Cat Emporium opened in London to significant media attention, boasting a two-month waiting list.  We are in Newcastle, sitting in Mog on the Tyne (est. 2015).

People want this.

Charlotte, beside me, is squirming

*barely contained cat-euphoria*

glowing fuzzy radiance. Unhinged.

And over there, our friends,

‘Other David’ & ‘Blue-haired Beth’

are gurning happiness from a window-seat

in this floss-spun Disney of the soul.

People, as I’ve said, want this.

Underneath a powerpuff mural

of a purple cat in a top-hat

brandishing a mug of tea

a family is holding court.

This is entertainment; wholesome

tactile and snap-happy

day-care for those beaming sprogs

untroubled, in such nasal innocence,

by allergies or the precautionary

pocket of anti-histamines. But –

if you insist (you being I, being Dave: me)

on being a dickhead

and asking for paper to write on,

to write a poem in the cat café!

Don’t lord it over this humble reservoir of goodwill,

don’t take cheap refuge in cynicism –

for you too ache for ‘Stan’ to like you.

(Stan is a cat, something of a café mascot

characterized by his endearing pink

squidge of tongue that sticks out

with involuntary charm.

A charm that betrays his readily clawed

and resentful nature – Stan has just

pawed a right-hook

to scold a child’s curiosity – dim interloper

of the whiskered high-rise.)

Yes, I want Stan to like me.

But there is more, and its not just the hangover

or my disconcerting need to shit

(an impossibility in a café

so small, so intimate)

that makes of this cheery ‘experience’

a plastic smile.

It is less a café

and more the staged approximation

of a café, as if devised

in the anodyne void

of studio-cleaned surfaces

and bright colours

familiar to a kind of

Children’s TV –

somewhere between

a sanitized hug of sunshine

and the button-eyed sock puppet

of a nervous break-down.

Despite this pins and needles

strain of Happy, there is that guilt.

Guilt that I should not be cynical

in a cat café. Why? Why bother?

Why not play and love and stroke

and joke and tweak and and and –

court the cat’s approval…      

A father stares

grimly

at his smartphone

his precocious child

explores magic

moggy kingdom.

The father scrolls

a listless

unseen feed

as his child proceeds

to laugh and chase

and flex her inquisition,

so far

from the grace

and studied boredom

of each café-

cat in

languid cushions

            of repose.

        

        

IV.

Though they are not hassled [ ‘DO NOT PICK THE CATS UP’;

illustration of startled cat and two disembodied hands

            BAD HANDS!]

they exude a weary distaste, a kind of long-suffering

endurance in the grim fluffed humouring

of this –

a crass catwalk of cat-life.

              Although, Charlotte reminds me,

they are ‘rescue cats’, and this café acts as a form of sanctuary –

so for fuck’s sake cheer the poem up. Enter into the spirit

as you would a panopticon

in which the mewing prisoners

are also the discerning guards.

No central hub

no reliable circle of cells,

no central spectator

and no

wheeling ranks of the surveyed.

Just the bristling

unease

that those looked-at

looking

have seen you seeing and see

how to play the game.

That self-same anxiety

that cools your

(surprisingly affordable)

vegetable and red-lentil soup

and reduces taste to a welcome

distraction

is also in the cat.

Yet, rather than anxiety,

The cat has serenely mastered

its nagging

twitch

that this

this

systemized showcasing of

cute’s prowess

is no more

novel

than a brothel

(albeit

one that frowns

on “sealing deals”

and swaps seedy

for quirky; trouser-poke

purchasing

to eager stroke worshipping

of trafficked tabbies)

this nervous disposition in the cat

is sublimated;

cloaked in suave indifference.

Traumas are deflected

and re-emerge

slinking

in postures of cool detachment; that air

of effortless agency

lightened

by the flurry, pounced

paw-swipe and bounce

that skittish starts, leapt as if in spasm

to reclaim a levity

of youthful mischief.

These are customary cat café lies.

V.

Charlotte is saturated with cat-love,

‘Blue-haired Beth’ is alive with her own azure

and ‘Other David’ is taking pictures, zooming

in on noble Stan, lens turning, turned and re-turned

in a near-religious fervor. (People want this.)

I have finished my soup, cat-shaped ipod speakers

elaborate the ghosts of tinny jazz, and the father

pockets his smartphone, signals to the child

that this disinfected utopia is no longer sealed

from the street outside and its passersby

that enumerate, in shuffled steps, the banality

of this day continuing, mundanely grey,

into another hour’s consideration.

They, yes they too, must leave the cat café.

I feel silly and guilty and still in need of a shit.

I have, not unpleasantly, whiled away

This precious cat café window

with a bleary tribute to my own denial.

It reminds me

of when I wrote

that poem in Pret a Manger

called ‘Regret a Manger’ about

what… I don’t know, the difficulty

of retaining self-respect

when writing a poem in a Pret.

The stench of your own bourgeois

flatulence coupling with sliced avocado.

I remember telling a friend about that moment

And him telling me I’d be

the first with my back against the wall

when the revolution comes. That seems fair.

So, on penning my queasy distrust

of the cat café I might reasonably be shot

(in service of a greater cause and my own

risible insistence in shrugging complicity).

But that tangent changes nothing,

just as writing this poem does not change

my enjoyment of the cat café.

The undeniable welling of fun

unravelling its ball of heart string

that I then elaborately re-knit,

fraying its darling pastel thread

through a laboured cat’s cradle

knotted in the central theme,

a grain that agitates

upon the oyster’s soiled tongue –

that there really is

a sense, in the twinkling sugar

of a cat café,

a sense that, maybe

this is how it ends.