Havin’ a Laugh at Poochie Park
“I didn’t realize you wrote poetry
I didn’t realize you wrote such bloody awful poetry”
-The Smiths
A couple posts ago I was talking about all that you could get away with in poetry. Well, this piece, I look at it today and it still makes me laugh, that I not only dedicated an evening to putting it together but that I actually had the balls to bring it in front of a class and read it aloud. People are writing diddies about their grandmothers and their tatoos, ex-boyfriends and alcohol, depression and sex. And I’m busy in my room crafting an ode to HBO’s The Wire, only with dogs instead of people. Oh, how I crack myself up.
I was just looking for a reason. When you’re in the middle of one of the best tv series ever made and in a poetry workshop in your last year of college and you overhear dogs going crazy in the distance at a dog park, it’s only natural that you imagine them warring over territory, that some dog drug deal has gone bad and there’s a badass vigilante pooch somewhere in the bunch out to disrupt the trade. Only natural.
I had a lot of fun with this one. It’s from March 15, 2009. It’s called “The Altercation at Poochie Park.”
The Altercation at Poochie Park
A white one with a bushy tail flashes her teeth
like they were switchblades or pistols
to prove she’s not a chump. She barks,
as if to say, “Play or get played,” then growls
like she owns the corner she’s crouching in.
Across the way, mongrels peddle Milk-bone
and Beggin Strips. They’re panting, giggling
as they hustle their stash. “Shit’ll sell,”
they’re repeating to each other. “Dumb mutts
don’t know it’s not bacon.”
Pure breeds line up like a gang against whitey,
their matted fur black and their eyes washed out
in hate. They bark back like gunshots, these canine gangsters
in a row, these racist Labs and Shepherds and Pomeranians.
The puppies in back are the wildest, shaking and yelping
at the cowards up front, saying, “We gotta stand tall!
She ‘aint nothing but an east-side bitch!”
Then the bitch tires of talking and attacks,
lunging from her corner toward the leader, a Lab
with a scar down the length of its face. They’re entwined,
loud and fast and tangled together—until hands come
and push them apart, pulling at their platinum collars
and hitting their noses. The gang disperses, yelling, “5-0! 5-0!”
And as the bitch is getting pulled away, she looks up
at the man dragging her toward a car. Her tail is between her legs
but she stares at him defiantly, as if to scoff,
as if to say, “I can jail.”
This entry was posted on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 at 7:10 pm and is filed under poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
