As for myself—wherever there was a street going indifferently about her business,
I was the dog.
At first I wept.
I became its beatings, shitting on command, bred and bred into more and more of it.
I crouched behind its bark, still as a stone ax.
I lunged at a greasy picnic on the table of some lawn.
I was dog's belonging, dog told me. We were nothing in and of ourselves—
one fiction abusing another.
I woke up in the cave of its crate, in the kennel of its name, the hinges of our jaws
locked tight by the muzzle.
My nose became an organ of thoughtfulness, my ears were shells
in which the seas of the voices of the world thrashed and
Night fell, day rose, the old died, the young went on.
One night I lay down and in the morning I was dog and my actions were fetched
by orders: fetch, lie down, lie down here.
Shaggy mat of thought, intellect swarming on a leash of woofs, I howled
at the door of my own mind wanting out of that empty house.
The tide of abstract thought receded. I grew hushed and flat, marooned inside
the odd blessings of appetite.
The voices of the masters perched above us said, you are just a gregarious
piece of furniture.
The war came and went beyond the bars of my life. I was dog.
Then I embraced it.
Then I was undone and replaced by it.
