21st Day of National Poetry Month – The Body Is Not Your Good Dog.
Good Dog! (Not Your Body)
The 21st day of National Poetry Month, and I have a terrible, terrible cold. So far, I’ve managed to spare you the poem devoted to “rhinovirus,” but I found, in trying to write tonight’s draft poem, that I could not stay completely away from the subject of the fickleness of the body.
Note, in reading the draft poem, that pauses are only intended to be taken based on punctuation–commas, semi-colons, periods–and not at the ends of lines (unless punctuated.)
Here, Body
The body is not your good dog.
It may sit, lie down, roll over,
do tricks for food, and seem to love;
but there’s a limit to its Rover
aspect. It will get sick just when
you tell it not to. There’s no yanking
on that leash. It will decay
when you say stay; there’s no spanking
with a rolled-up newspaper,
not even the Times, which can train
it to heel, to keep
to the right side of that called sane.
It won’t obey you even when
it knows what you desperately want,
when its lesson has been learned
before, again; still, it will vaunt
its own fleshly, furry ways,
taking up all room upon your bed,
refusing to hush when hushed,
and, except when dancing, to be led.
Tags: 21st Day of National Poetry Month, drawing of dog and elephant, manicddaily, Manicddaily pencil drawing, ManicDDaily poetry, National Poetry Month, poem about fickleness of body, poetry about dog and body, quatrains, rhyming poem
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ManicDDaily 
April 22, 2010 at 12:09 am
Get well soon…and I vote for letting the heel-heal pun haunt the poem unstated.
It took till about day 16, but now I can’t read your
drafts without editing mentally. For two weeks I read them as poems, taking the draft aspect as mere conceit. I can’t remember exactly which word in exactly which line of exactly which poem, but I suddenly realized I was missing all the fun. I think the published draft has a potential in itself as new art form, meant to engage the reader actively, as a collaborator, and hence in a completely different way than a finished poem. Written with a different aim, the published draft would also deserve its own distinct standard of success — where a perfect polished poem posing as a draft, a text that didn’t let the reader in, would get judged a failure. Just a thought.
April 22, 2010 at 6:21 am
Ha. That is an appealing idea, especially with all the interactive media, e-publishing etc.
I didn’t even think of haunt! And, you are right, the heel, heal, may be a bit obvious. I had something else included in that line that may have lessened the emphasis, but the line was too long.
I hope you are enjoying them and feel free to send me suggestions, or your own poems (!) or topics (!) They are certainly true drafts; I do revise a bit as I go, but I haven’t been able to start them until pretty late at night. Luckily, I never changed my wordpress “clock” to daylight savings time, so I get an extra hour’s cheat time, if needed.
Of course, the best thing about “publishing” a draft is that you can revisit again without complete embarrassment.