cat doll

first, they said it was his teeth
so we stitched his mouth shut
and cut him a new one and
the white stuffing fell out in clumps
like

when they said it was his heart
that it ticked too much
was broken by itself, for once, not
someone else, and i envied him,
as i stuffed his ears with foam
and it dribbled down his acute cheeks
and he shed hair for days
but

they were wrong both times,
the problem with the cat doll was that
it was bad from the inside, rotten,
we'd always called him rotten,
because of mischief, and never known
it was the right diagnosis.