A DOG’S LIFE AND OURSspend your days fenced in tied to one leash or another sit! speak! fetch! beg for a treat get a pat on the head once in awhile quit barking! stop whining! when you're alone pace the same spot until the ground turns to stone scratch futile holes in the packed earth half burying old bones howl at the moon chew sticks to splinters and rubber balls to shreds peer through cracks in the fence wonder what's out there go crazy wondering then die get the needle before springtime without its sweetness in your lungs except we don't get the needle only murderers do we die in sterile white rooms inhaling bleach at midnight not surrounded by our families like in the movies shivering even under a mountain of blankets a dog outside in the cold THROUGH WINDOWS Even winter storms are loved, through windows, from inside a warm house, as are frozen faces in photographs and people on TV, or homeless refugees from another country read about on a smartphone screen by a man who rises from his seat and takes his six dollar latte to the other side of the coffee shop to avoid the rattling cup and the stink of a bum who just wandered in from the cold. A LITTLE LONGEROften as I walk the headland paths I will happen upon a lonely beach somewhere in a little cove with a stream trickling down beneath piles of bleached driftwood logs like scattered dinosaur bones resting on a bed of pebbles broken shells and other shattered and unrecognizable things coughed up by the ocean and left there for us to ponder I like to sit amid all that brokenness that tangled mass of life and death to walk around and feel at home in it to pick through piles of seashells with edges sharp as broken beer bottles sifting the chaos searching just to search a little longer GENTLY CRACKINGshe seemed broken a web of fractures in her almond eyes hair dyed pupil black her flesh a thousand punctures a camouflage of ink i could hide in swim with her dolphins lie among her flowers tangle myself in her vines she blew puffs of her life before me into my face like smoke from a joint of the greenest i nodded inhaling wisps of her story in a daze listening to the ice cubes gently cracking as i poured her another drink MISTAKEN FOR DEADwe are indeed
crucified with him nailed to crosses of belief engraved with sun bleached words flaking to the ground yet worn like armor on our lips against foes we’ve never met fields of us writhe like windblown grass shaking fists in the air and i wonder... will the wood rot and the fervent nails squeak free before the vultures come for our eyes?
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