It pleasures her to hold
him captive there-
to keep him in the reach of her
blood-matted paws.
It is your fate, she has often
said, to endure
my riddling. Your fate to live
at the mercy of my
conundrum, which, in truth,
is only a kind
of psychic joke. No, you shall
not leave this place.
(Consider anyway the view from
here.) In time,
you will come to regard my questioning
with a certain pained
amusement; in time, get so
you would hardly find
it possible to live without
my joke and me.