THE BARKING DOGS HAVE ALL GONE Comments

Boy, I'd like to know: what makes it worthwhile,
the navel-gazing quiet by the pilot light of your bathroom heater,
preaching love at every sneeze, fretting over the absurdity of
first names because today I spoke a baying albino dog in the street
that read the warts on its balls as braille and then still didn't know
whether we were allowed to write poems about the moon.

Boy, I'd like to know: what makes it worthwhile to keep living
this life, to persist in anger and keep on writing;
letters, essays, poems, in which you recommend yourself and
revile the world, combat indifference, the days of faits divers.

Boy, I'd like to know: what makes it worthwhile to keep on
writing till people forget your debut when
our finger no longer serves to point at the moon but your four
readers would rather google huggable junkies.

All hope is in vain when from the farmette you warble chatter verses
into the world, compress your thoughts into a couple of status bars,
write an essay in one-hundred-and-forty characters. (I know a poet
who braids his beard into a noose - the barking dogs have all gone.)

Boy, my dream is both impossible and baleful, all the windbags are at it
in this feck-to-feck race and what remains is a ream of paper
with all that hopeless angling, but I promise:

I'll lift up head from chest, to give the ribs some space and keep on
writing: letters, essays, poems etcetera.

That dog: do not forgive him.
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