The Dogs of Moscow

I’ve got trouble driving down the middle of the road.  But that’s because I don’t feel much, really, for it.  I’ve got to wax bombastic, assaulting my own indifference.  Smelly little lithe deceit, I’m not the only one complicit in it.  See when it wanes who’s unblinking, breathing quietly.  They will speak at each other as to a dog.  Less given than a dog gives when keeping rivals from his harem, keeping people from his pups.  The dogs of tomorrow have another thing coming.  Euthanasia, sterilization.  Meanness never knew such a true channel as this, pain, never this apt a receiver.  We see each other though—it’s all right there around us, watch.  But gruffly we feel each other’s space, invade and vacate.  Fictionalize the only true thoughts we almost have by stopping to think how we might tell them so that they sound true.  See, it’s been a lost cause (truth) since that first exaggerated gesture, indeed since the first metaphor.  And this is something we sense, so we go on sometimes letting ourselves believe, knowing the day will never come from our lips.  We’ve mastered the hidden place.  But this is also why the dogs are barking, why we must walk by unalarmed.  Holier than thou, we’ll find that if it really is God’s hand plucking us from the preterite or losing us within the fold, it is with at best fat fingers, so better that we own our lucky numbers and quit figuring our debts are owed.  Do unto others before they do you and you’ll never even see the blood.  You’ll never need to lie with the dogs again.

Dig In

Savvy to the deathblow really fed lines couldn’t carry the both of us, a piteous strangle for a fistful.  Dolled up and dipping, yes, hunger curbs more easily than the nerve it took to pluck a candy bar and coolly duck the guard.  Hunger puts the muscle on its ass.  

Sets it down and shows it its master.  See, we’re all on some or several tethers.  It’s just a wonder that a puppy-eyed shot can’t tug the food stores open.  That our young honest image is not for lasting, and we cultivate, indeed create, upon an empty belly.

Double Negative

A dastardly snug coffin, dragging nails and heaving.  Furls in the forehead, tapping on the balcony and replacing tired vocabulary with new old words.  The hegemony of it is that our chitin isn’t heavy enough to sit and soak the eminence.  Our hearts are leaden pipes.  And our ruling line is that the half-life of the first nuclear blast is not yet finished, but we’ve been born late into today.  A ways away from actually believing the hammers can fall, instead duded up and following our dicks around.  Instead of rebels, relevant now in only a mid-shelf crescendoing wakefulness that rubbers aren’t fun and coming with the customers is out the way of Wheel-O-Fortune, antennae, and this is your brain on drugs.  That we can’t commit is no new sin.  That we sit inside over eggs and toast like our granddads did is a hope, though even as the shit gathers in worlds of other orders, we’ve only got this little bit.  If there’s an answer out there, we haven’t found its language.  If there is one true tyranny of the human race, it’s in that single breath between extremities, such that plots cusp.  Believing is a personal past time.  But no one sees that nothing coming, not when it’s up to us.

Cinch

Pinching at the parallax

Clenching as plenum, mustard

Setting yesmen, yellow tamarind

Lopped side-saddle, keggered and ready

Dear you, unused, as was the prancing jigsaw

Jingling and quick like a baby rattler

Lingering and sick, as was the pocket figure

Look here, pastor, I’ll stand on my own two

Shimmy whatever deadbolt, hotwire

So I’m leaving you the keys

Management

Until they love the leash, it’s a lash at best, a goosebump stood straight to whip in wait.  The heat after fabric is for follicles whose passage is laid beneath a rash.

Until they loathe the beast, it’s a bath at least, a bloodhound turned retriever, a fella for the fuck of letting, a loosening of stocking.  Pull tight my pudding.  A touch is on that tangent.

A nose is pointed.  Whose I pierced through paper sheets once.  White was the makeup.  All of this is made up.  This is the boredom of bedroom left to its inevitable dogshit.  Its undodgeable, goddamnit undoggable, digs.  

So they wait for the food.  To them our feet are our faces.  Lead them through the park.  Forget where the tongue has been.  Shit bitch, lemme.

Slip

As long as we’ve got a word 

For it, we can kill it

So revel in the unspeakable 

Moment.  Lift your face, face

Him, otherwise hum

Is it better to be certain 

But wrong than uncertain 

But right?  Is it better to kill 

With discretion or without?  

The divisive occidental

Gives us a simple choice, stringing 

Negatives.  Either it is wrong.  Or it is 

Not wrong.  But can choice, a reduction 

Exclusion, really be 

the way to new knowledge?

Is there, with Ockam, room for 3?  Or

Is this a lapse?  A bridge

Stepping out on breath

OK, if I just step a little 

Lighter, until the apparition

Evaporates underfoot

I don’t want to be as thankless 

As trees.  Never so rooted in

The accidental story

As Cadmus is, or was.  But a partition

Rough touch, vulgar tongue

Teeth for sewing

That strange, if honest to god, casual 

Encounter, too meek for the reaping

A render out of solid state.  Bombs and contest

This being bread and butter

Here, the presence of a leaky dreamer

A look across the fridge

And the ruddy lauder’s sonant sigh

Are against the edge of headroom

Against the flush of faces

Such that après-day is put so far off

That snooze is already steady metronome

A rhythmic season of the arm, by the time

We enter sleep