Black Dog on Hill

My dog

pants on hill,

whirlygig ears

drooling down

dead yellow snap

grass of brittle heat

beneath his belly.

My papers

won't flutter

like a whore's petticoats,

but lie still,

trembling virgins.

They don't fool me.

It's only poetry.

They don't care

 for my strange

invisible sweaty distortions

stuffed inside

a homemade kaleidoscope

twisting ‘til fisted bits

burst like mythogies

pulsed in a blender,

pieces I then strain through

the holes in my mind's tongue

and spit back out

asking, is it good?

They don't want

my sulfur smelling,

spanish moss hanging

story of spines burnt

cotton raw in fields of hunger,

this inheritance;

a backward looking behind

of a book hitching south,

twitching the twang

in my move along,

Mistah, there's more to tell.

But time gives me

a knowing sitdown.

there's more to waste

than I first thought,

because the story

stops before we get

to now.

In anticipation

of innards pounding

mental doors in argument,

my terms hide, defiantly

deafening themselves

to all contrary bloodletting.

I'll end my life at childhood,

as I so often thought of doing.

the what that happened,

after I, supposedly, grew up,

can't be released

without someone getting bitten

by catastrophe,

so lock the gate.

Everything culminates

in a panting dog,

black coat drinking heat

an open mouthed exchange

of hot air for hot air.

The same bargain,

a different name,

until we can't take it anymore

and go to the backdoor

scratching, begging,

to be let back in.

.