
The Bearers of Gifts
The bearers of gifts to the holy shrine
Often stumble and often fall
Often heavier than the burden
Is the sorrow in the soul.
The bearers of gifts to the holy shrine
Blunder and are led astray,
Often childlike they are trundling
Into pitfalls on the way.
The bearers of gifts to the holy shrine
Often are not worldly wise,
And scoffing, sneering and derision
Haunts their luckless enterprise.
The bearers of gifts to the holy shrine
Often see their trail of blood;
Far ascension and descension
And ahead lies the thornier road.
The bearers of gifts to the holy shrine
Bear their gifts with troubled heart and mind:
They may find door and gate bolted
And the gardener neither good nor kind.
Merry Christmas
You’ll think I’m nuts to print such punk stuff as I have on these other pages and then say “Merry Christmas.” ‘Twas done on purpose, to encourage you. No matter how inexperienced a writer you are, you can certainly write better than that. No, I didn’t write it. Let’s be charitable and not reveal the culprit.
Why not try publishing a paper? You can write me about doing one of this size for you. Don’t ask for a 6 by 9, I can’t print that size. And don’t ask for previous Wild Cats. I have none to spare.
I called my first The Cheerful Cat and I sent it to Doc Noel to mail. He never did so I called the rest Wild Cats. He didn’t mail those so I quit. Now that we have a new arrangement, with Bros. Noel and Erford on the outside, it’s safe to resume. I’m an Amateur Journalist, not a fanatic single-associationist. I belong to the AAPA, APC, Fossils, NAPA, UAPA, and UAPA Alumni.
I have printed over 100 amateur papers, 30 of them for other ajays. I’m not a pro printer. It’s a hobby. After ten years in Amateur Journalism I feel that I can help our hobby more by spending half of my spare time doing papers for others than devoting all my leisure to my own papers. And as two ajays have had me do three papers apiece [6 papers] in six months, I guess I must satisfy them.

There Are So Many
There are so many, so many of our kind
That wonder and that brood in loneliness.
We are in capitols we are in cities, we are in villages.
But we the lonely ones are lonely, ever lonely.
There are so many, so many of our kind
But we are never a fraternity, we are never a fold
We are never a congregation.
There are so many, so many of our kind
But we do not seek to gather into assemblies,
For us there are no forums
We never want a quorum.
Destined to be lonely, we choose the less trodden paths,
And we are not in need of walls or fences to isolate ourselves
In order to be lonely we shunt and we shun others of our kind
Meeting we step aside as we part and we separate
And we go our ways
The ways of those who need the pious dignity
Of their solitude and the reveries of solitude.
O, we the lonely, must be lonely!
I Saw Awe
I saw awe faced awe (O primal schism)
Mystic fear faced fear
And I sensed antagonism
Of sphere to alien distant sphere.
The earth heard and gazed with myriads of eyes
At the starry dust
Downward solemnly stern looked the skies,
Alas, without fate and without trust.
Diffused Awe
Diffused awe spells my soul
That cannot comprehend,
That heaven is no neighbor
And heaven is no friend.
I was taught and believed
And still hope otherwise
There is my father and mother
And God and paradise.
Not secured from the UAPA Manuscript Bureau
Printing these “poems” was a mistake. Mistakes cannot be corrected, only forgiven.

This Wild Cat number 38 was printed for the UAPA by Alfred Babcock, Cranford, N.J.