Poem 132

Visceral … written just after my 23rd birthday, the fourth in the daily poems that would total sixty over three months … I was pretty charged up, having thrown in my computer programming job and wanting to see if I could make a go of this writing thing … I’m struck now by how many of these hold up, the sense of uncorked energy behind them, an aggressive edge (as here) goaded by a knowledge of the kind of working life that awaited me if I failed …

( another evening poem … good rhymes but also nice alliteration – blind/black pus/punctured/paces shadowed/sky follows/far hunts/horizon – plus assonance – snouts/ground master/answer/over … I like the way the poem says that as overwhelming as fall of night may be it’s only ever temporary … )

Black Dog

The dog of night is charging
charging across his yard
he'll leap right through the daylight panes
and stand bleeding in the shards

he pisses dark into the corners
and claims them for his own
he gnaws the sun and buries it
beside his gristly bones

the blind black dog of evening
leaking pus from a punctured eye
paces all the aeroplanes
across the shadowed sky

his matted bristles spike
as he snouts into the ground
and follows on after something
far away you hear him sound

but every dog knows a master
and must answer to its chain
though he hunts the horizon over
it will pull him back again