dog – haiku and other animals

I cough and February again

a joke the smirking wind might make to

Enkidu in the land of shadow

but this even older

chair a little dog

sharing some warmth

something other

than dust

falls from

my mouth

I think of all the groundhogs I haven’t
known on this windy day in almost May
scurrying away with powerful claws and

the face of my dog bred to chase
their kind staring in amazement a
never-sated hunger in those bones

the dog spins
deeper in the blanket
Polaris

late bare tree rain again counting the dog’s nipples

my boss, a collector of insomniacs walks the halls on stilts, examines every coffee cup, for progress and, avoids the stairs today is Friday, and the small dog always by her side, will have its nails cut, when we hear the yelping we instinctively check our 401(k)s, and count the leaves of the cypress, as our greatest asset, in a moment the weekend will, begin and the dreams we share, shift to images of pirate ships, chained to a monstrous wave of silver fish

Excerpts from My Autobiography

xxxxx

once the image has life an emptiness says
it will always be so I stare into the distance
blind to trees and flowers
begging to be born but the refrigerator hey
are we doing stream of consciousness
cool and the snow gets sharp in these
huge piles in the back of the lot
days later my handwriting
starts to rot never to recover

xxxx

suicide off the table you start working again
with a miniature saucepan and the clock trying
to rid the mind of all the rules you’ve
made &
feel your hand tight around the thick
rope now only good for that
silly exercise you love

xxxx

away from the neighbor’s dog
across stinging fields we grow
smaller so slowly we don’t
notice until grasshopper parts become
our yard sticks and blades
of grass jostle and topple us in this
dream-familiar landscape we
learn secrets of slow growth, the rootlike
lineages of wormkind and a love
of the sweetness that writhes up from
dark earth and we long to pass
it on to our children who have
grown monstrous in the orange light

the spooked dog
runs from the sprinkler
and pees

News Feed

hoping for something chocolate
covered hurry up wait what
was I saying the shorelines
shorten birds
gone from the sky
due to a
lack of how’s it with you those
headaches back I have just the
oil and volcanoes waiting
maybe for & the
coasts blame the
center and vice versus the
scattered poems to stitch it all
but we’re in it together
did you hear
what the final
butterfly
whispered as your phone oh I’m
no better I just like to
talk and that sting in your should
you maybe
check out the dog
filter that
clown one does nothing for you

April

quiet the new green
stretches gropes

later blisters on the skin

but knows already
what it will

it starts to itch and

one drop clings
to the leaf the ground
takes it all in and

that dog

looking thin like the well
inside me that well

you know

white sky early in the year a small dog creeps inside