ManicDDaily



Good Dog! (Not Your Body)

The 21^st 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.