Dogs

    The greatest living sculptors are dogs, dogs lost in daydreams
who emerge from their complex relaxation to partake of the nutritious gruel
servants present to them daily with reverent bows
    Then, mysteriously
Divine Inspiration? Earth Goddess Muse? Life Force? Driven by Madness?
    they trot outside and create marvelous excrement-sculptures
    They become famous instantly
their sculptures generate feverish excitement in their audience
who applaud wildly wagging tail and tongue
    Their audience circles the masterpiece
sniffs it, rubs noses in it, taste it, sometimes even add to it great collaborators
Then, once quieted, they sit before the still warm sculpture attentively, head cocked,
listening

    The Poetics of Night-Fall

    Every time I closed my eyes everything would be so far away,
at a distance predetermined by dreams,
though I was not dreaming.
    I awoke, as if from a dream, by merely opening my eyes.
It was dusk all around outside me;
yet a sun was reflecting setting on the horizon of the acids in my stomach.
The noises made inside me were like a toilet running.
    'Sleep would only complicate matters,' I said to that most distant part,
my mind; my heart
continuing bleeding from the sudden leeches of my nerves.
I continued with my eyes closed,
continued continuing,
a need both within and outside the earth of my knowledge.
I was bleeding to death,
and at the same time threading life through the flesh of non-understandable existence,
under glaring flourescent light and lowing of doctors and nurses,
up until my death.
The light still an annoyance; I begged someone, anyone (for he'd forgotten the use of names),
turn it off! Stop it! 'Stop the light!'
    "Come into the light." The compilation of every voice heard during life;
and, being a command, even though gentle, he decided to ignore it.
His past dry as mustard.
    He could remember most all of his existence,
but for lack of wanting to,
and simply being annoyed by the light, he forgot.
    "The light is good" 'A silly voice made of everyone's.'
    "Perhaps he should open them" 'Who was that?'
    But, and as if, he opened his eyes;
he was not surprized as he would have been at being transformed into a white winged angel,
but as he had been when, at twenty,
he gave a single red rose to a girl with his indeterminate smile,
which, when his smile fell at hers, wilted, purple,
then crumbled black, to dust in her hand.