Canis
Episodes of A Dog
In The Global Village
Book 1
I.
In the utter conspiracy of our existence,
The mind sputters to life:
“Beginnings,” I howl in the rusty country midnights. “They must spring
forward from somewhere.” From which, towards which,
From the urgent belly of a hungry mind, only conjectures.
From the feral priest, to his pitiful deities.
From the amorous father, to his mindless sons.
To his living progeny. Only intellection.
In the name of explication: “His duty, our honor to receive.”
For once, there is universal agreement.
A: Although we still do not see eye to eye.
B: That's because you are shorter than I am!
A: Here we go again.
B: Size Queen.
A: Will it kill you to swallow the olive fig?
B: My urine-soaked teddy bear will slaughter me.
A: What are you? Five?
B: I have a formidable imagination.
A: And I have the last word.
B: (Picks Up The Kitchen Cleaver) Yes, you do.
Of a vague, overarching notion.
Of an inchoate strand of an idea that goes on.
Serendipity, coincidence, a nacreous master plan.
Or a motley crew of nothing and everything.
Yet it stands so clearly: That there is a starting point.
Like an overture to the symphony,
It stands so clearly: There is a beginning.
(But in the weal of our discovery.)
But oh, But oh, Look.
Even
The Logical Sense, tells me that there is an end.
What must begin, it must finish. Cruel adage,
Stocked in the supermarket of our modern rotting living,
Along the pristine shelves, “Near The Detergent Section,”
She said, as she moved away nonchalantly to
Fulfill her hourly commitment to Minimum Wage.
“An excellent choice for a God,” I offered.
She never smiled, as she lugged her cartons of cartons away.
And I continued to sniff for it.
Before finding the cruel adage in an ordered mess – designed in such a way so we can spend our money better. “It is good for us,”
A situation for our mutual victory. The advertisement had proclaimed.
So Buy It. And it CONVEYED nothing more essential.
Footnote: But you can live your wealth on
this contagious Earth.
Then leave it here.
“Yes, it spreads nowhere but here. Peculiar disease,” Doctor Williams had said.
“Peculiar, indeed.”
“Mom, is there sodium in here,” I asked a long time ago,
a paw in my mouth.
My virgin experience with the product of human living.
CHECK THE LABEL.
“Why can't you just tell me if -”
BECAUSE YOU NEED TO LEARN HOW TO READ.
“Really now? Two infinitives in one sentence, Mom?”
JUST TRY. OKAY?
“Okay.”
OH YES, I FORGOT TO MENTION.
“Mention what, Mom?”
TAKE IT WITH AN EXTRA BUCKET OF SALT.
Cruel Adage: 240 Calories. Go Towards The End.
It Will Further Read: Wise Words of Wisdom.
Manufactured in The Cathay.
Produced by The Inductive, dragging the darkness into our
ashen eyes, frail bodies. “Beginnings,” I howl.
“Why do we seek finality for them?”
When there is none an answer,
My nose becomes a curious organ:
The crackling sky skulks in the clouds,
The rustling streak of blue in the horizon.
The pitter-patter of autumn rain,
Gravity, it brings the heavens down here.
The smells titillate me, excite me,
And hurl me into a complete frenzy.
The answer is here in my soil. So,
I am digging for a musty bone, musty,
Till I find one.
But no sane
master would lay my bone in
the unfinished world - -
merely to gawk at
the travails of our search.
If it is meant to be,
it will be in nature, it will
be in an obvious nature. But,
there is none an answer.
For now.
Yet
My
world is as fresh as my awakening – my four paws
pacing into the quotidian sunrise. It is still new,
It is motivated,
It is our poetry, and it will endure. The world is many things,
and it begins as I begin. Like the fire ignites,
When the match is fiercely struck against restless rocks,
when lightning lashes at the
random tree, when my thoughts are flying-by, careening against my beautiful skull - -
a spark, a spark, ahoy!
It singes, it burns. It is sustained, as it is began. The world is as new as I am. For I howl, I howl, to the morning of my song.
To the wilderness out there. I am coming for you,
I am coming for you. For,
There is a whistle in the wind,
And an electric upon my tail,
There is a danger in the night,
And the road is long, I must trot along.
I will chew on the leaves of grass,
And the road is long, I must stray along.
From the concrete pavements of our one-way streets,
From the caramel sand dunes of our wastelands,
From the redbrick rooftops upon suburbia,
From the seaweed upon our seashores,
From the sturdy fiberglass of our monumental skyscrapers sweeping through our diseased cities - -
From the precious dwindling air of my remarkable tree friends rushing through our forests - -
Not to somewhere, someplace, some destination,
Not to somewhere, someplace, some destination,
Where there is none but here and everywhere.
So breathe it in now, wise sage.
There is more recklessness I can bear,
Here, there is no cruel adage,
It is an infinite sky, I dare say.
For there is an ineffable ullage,
Which spills eternal,
And it tastes better as it ages.
The world is here and now.
For if the world is tremendous enough for you,
it will spring forward and never halt.
I am a dog in the global village.
It shall always begins with a whimper,
But it is hitherto: A Terrific Bang ahead
A yawp into the abstract unknown.
II.
I sniffed, I sniffed.
I looked to the decrepit signs on the roads,
in the blunt expirations of physical life,
in the wordless distances,
in the cosmological humdrum of turbulence,
in the mechanical solutions to woe,
I sniffed, I sniffed.
strangely hoping that these omens would
thrill me enough to gallop towards
where they would all converge.
I sniffed, I sniffed.
And my insurmountable lust for wandering
lured me along, like a raging bull to the scarlet cloth.
A: But he's a dog!
B: No, he insisted that he was a bull.
A: Four legs.
B: A metaphor. The magical haze of our language.
A: What is that? Like your urine-soaked teddy bear?
B: Can we be objective here?
A: No.
B: Didn't think so, either.
A: Tedious cliche, though.
B: (Takes Out The Arsenic Pill) Yeah.
As I strode into town, I heard the wry voices
of apocopated human life once more. These fools
raze themselves, starve themselves
work themselves to certain death - -
so that others could live better,
and celebrate profusely in the tare.
Altruism has never been so self-destructive.
Alms in the hands of Avarice.
Yet it is so noble a self-sacrifice.
“Deserves a standing ovation,” J.S muttered, A quiet finger to his broken lips.
Before fishing for a pencil and eraser,
And another actionless cheque for charity,
Salvage the poor dogs in blunt photographs.
It is the system of our sterilized world,
It is the mark of our gilded civilization.
One man poorer, is another brother richer,
One hound satiated, is another gone hungry.
A soul-less pyramid in the flux of noise.
Vox! Vox! You must rise against it.
Formulate another system in its place!
What have you become, Henry?
“Tell them you are enceinte, and ask for food,”
The midget husband told his homeless wife,
We are not dying yet, Henry.
“Just do as I say, just do as I say.”
But why must I, a woman of suffrage?
“Because I have a bulging part of me in you.”
Cut me loose, please.
“The puppet never retorts, now come closer.”
Cut me loose, please.
“Lupae! The attic for you now!”
The screeching argument of ancient origins
reverberate in the air.
Fortunately and fortunately so,
I have a heuristic ear for conversations.
And I leaned in closer to listen. But,
The haggardly man waved me away,
As he finally pounced on his wife.
I snarled at him,
with a ferocity in my breath.
“Why won't you let me hear you speak?”
with a ferocity in my breath.
Oh Tell Our Children:
Forget It, Throw some money to the sleeping dogs,
It's another foggy day in London town,
Where the tiresome streets are slippery,
And its mendicants forage the sidewalks.
And The Government! The Government. Surely,
They will put a silver spoon in your mouth
Send your brats to college on a crutch,
And resist the petty strikes of you Commoners,
When they eradicate the crown,
And its knack for regal ostentation.
But oh, you have to make up your mind then.
There is no scales of balance here.
You will discover only singularity.
It's either the Free or the Contagious Hospital.
Yet,
You might wager if it will snow on Christmas day,
I yelp to the rabbits running amok. But,
While in China, oh in The Cathay,
It's an old world still,
in spite of, despite, the Evolution
you annunciate. It hasn't changed much.
It hasn't changed much.
In Fuzhou,
For Christmas, they will
incarcerate fellow humans and make them work like
Dogs at the wheel. So the
Cogs can take the congested trains
Home, to far-flung straw-houses in the
Foam of snow-hat mountain ranges
When their new year comes around.
Then must it strike you, that we are
Standing on someone else's ceremony,
Tending to our own.
This is how the world sees China,
Piss-drunk on its yellow cash river
laying comatose in the silt,
and vulnerable to the world.
Yet they are moving fast,
First, Beijing. Then, Shanghai.
The space-cities of our future.
They will light the way forward
and blur our visions ahead.
The fireflies in the dark: Taiwan,
Tibet, Mongolia - a Grand Cathay,
For the people, for the canines.
For our entire community of die-hard Capitalists.
From our rocky satellite, I behold
The dark smog of machines and human waste,
Swivel frivolously through chimneys,
And open toxic lakes and dead oceans,
Slither into the ozone,
Smash its angry fist at the wall,
and holler – Behold the hole
You and I have made.
And the universe stands still,
Ready ground for an infestation,
An invasion of human virtue,
And hear the howler go off.
Dear J.S.,
I suppose I must dispense with my usual diplomacy,
and stab straight at your heart. I wouldn't even
try to commend you here. To begin, I must rail
against your utterly,
Lame and limping language!
You think you can save us from ourselves? You think it is merely another burden that you should carry? What makes you think that it is even a burden in the first place? It is inane – and it very nearly puts a bullet in my brain - that we should perpetuate the ills of our forefathers and their soi disant civilizing mission. What remarkable good does history render us, if we are not to pick the leaves of grass from it? Drivel, my friend. Drivel, you are only capable of. Take your lofty ideals, and scram – there is another sky out there for you. I am indignant – yes – that you would succumb to the naiveté of our time. That one man's problem is everyone's problem. But that is merely the penultimate straw. What makes me so absolutely disappointed with you, is the fact you will use fear to bend our world to your own designs. You know, I actually have an overwhelmingly apposite appellation for what you are. You are an eco-terrorist.
And you might ask, what makes me so qualified to such unflinching disdain for your weltanschuaang? I am merely a dog in the global village. And a young one at that. I have seen much and as much as you have. But in terribly different shades, and perhaps - - and only perhaps - - with a larger scope. I confess, I have yet to experience everything and all - - that is spat from my foul mouth. In fact, I must speak with a difficulty of mind. When I say I know, I know - - I just know with a pang in my heart that your bravery is an exercise in futility.
My suggestion to you, is to let us
destroy it, and be destroyed with it.
Why change anything and everything that has been.
Just let sleeping dogs be.
J.J.C
I am jolted awake,
from the newspaper landscape of a nightmare,
from the breaking news of white noise,
from the stale bread of our nightly news.
In my restless sleep,
There is the tang of blood in my throat,
I have swallowed the liver of desperation,
and tasted the gore of its sinews. It is
a nightmare, it is a nightmare,
that makes a travesty of our existence.
And as I toss around in my blankets,
fur brushing against the warm spread of cotton,
then stretching my paws and my jaw,
I realize in the dawning of hope,
and with an irritated yawn,
That there is nothing new.
N-O-T-H-I-N-G N-E-W.
There is nothing new here.
And even my dreams have said it:
We are doomed, We are doomed.
III.
What lovely weather, to poison pigeons in the beach park
on a tropical Sunday afternoon. The heat is just about
right, and the birds come splatting to the pavement
in a synchronized sing-song fashion.
“I feel a little dizzy,”
“You don't say, I have been expurgating for the last thirty minutes.”
A fugue in the fantastic making:
Ca-dunt, Ca-dunt, Ca-dunt, as they collapse,
flesh, and feathers - on the concrete floor.
I edged up closer to the pile of bodies,
and I put my wet nose to the tepid
brush of recent demise.
“If you would have any semblance of intelligence, you would stay far and away from them,” the black crow cawed from above, while perched on a balding coconut tree. In response, I circled around the tree. He cawed once more, before muttering under his breath. “Stupid dog, you ought to be leashed.”
I tilted my head to the left, and to the right.
Cowardly creatures – crows – Say it in my face, if you must.
“Intelligence isn't quite necessary these days, is it?” I barked back, and laid down below him. On impulse, I scratched the back of my ears with my hind paws, demanding some relief from myself. There was sand still clinging to my flappy ears, and I panted.
“Garung-guni, garang-guni,”
The rag-and-bone man cries
out in the wasteland of
our university, and
the life of the mind is tragic
and trash. Maggots feed
on leftovers in the gaping
cracks of wisdom. There is not
enough, not enough thews
to hold the mental body
no more. Apart,
it falls. Ca-dunt, Ca-dunt,
together into the garbage dump,
ready for the incinerator.
I cry for the whilom
beauty of the institution,
the last kennel of hope
for humankind.
Forget how to think! It is an impractical
trinket to wear around the neck these
days. For why do students of the mind - -
hold these bloody textbooks to their pale faces
and - - cram out the whole wide brain
with useless matter - - if they do not
love philosophy? Noli
Cogitare! Noli!
Just procure
a job, and die. It will occupy your
life, and defy nature's expectation
for you to breathe.
As the locus of the mind comes down,
the refugee tents for our civilization are wrapped up.
We are on our own for now,
we are on our own for now.
Maybe we will come anew from this.
Fortasse.
Ennui: I looked out -
the apertures of my plastic cage.
And there I was, sitting in the Atlanta
airport terminal. Ennui. I started
yelping to the moon, when I beheld the
wheels of the aeroplane spin
and lift from the winter tarmac floor.
Here they go again, these steel birds
soaring to find another chunk of earth,
without me.
I am in transit
in the nexus of the global village.
There is something about the airport - -
not the impermanence of it - - but the - -
clear-sky
notion that we are an inextricable
part of an assimilated mess in the
unpredictable world order of things. “We need to hurry.”
“Why?”
“Gate change. We need to catch a connection at another terminal building. Twenty minutes before boarding.”
“We won't make it, we can't run with a cage in our arms.”
But I am happy here, why should we rush?
Just prop your ears out and listen closely,
listen to the muffled sounds uttered here:
a dog mill of confabulations.
Listen to the English!
In its virgin form - - a bastard's language.
Hear the measures, hear the shuffling feet,
It is alive, dancing! And it is a growing puppy still,
Suckling on the warm milk of strangers who will feed it
When these faraway men pry open their mouths to speak.
In the airport of all places, a sea of: takeaway boxes,
coffee condoms, paper receipts, duffel bags slung on
shoulders, dog-eared bestsellers, flimsy air tickets,
towed luggage, tired hands, waiting passengers.
“Come closer, let me lick you,” the language said. “Come closer.”
It is not the terminus - - it is neither the beginning,
that tickle my nose. It is the sprinting surprises of
fleeting destinies at the airstrip: venio ioque.
Yet tonight, we are dragged into the fray,
condemned to love the locus of the transient
before escaping back home.
“Do you have flexible travel plans? We are in an oversell situation and we need volunteers who are able to take a later flight.”
My bonnie lies over the air. The air! The air!
Ouranos! Ouranos! It calls out to me,
summoning us home. Ouranos!
I say to you, my companion, that the sky is not
our home. Noli! There is treachery in the particles
of air we gulp in our compounded breaths, they
are colliding against themselves - - the air lies,
the air lies, you cannot see through it - - and it
has no one to answer to - - it is an autonomous
canvas of gray glimmering above us. Where does
its fugue lead us towards? Where. The jagged rocks
are littered among the clouds, the piercing corals
exploding in the nimbus of starlight, a sly flimflam
to draw me into the shores of the troposphere, where Caelus
awaits with his open jaws for the soaring dog.
Begrimed - -
is the nostos, the very idea of it, befouled. So I paddle,
through the sonicboom of the aeroplane, burning to
get away. But the sky calls me home once again.
A large
compact bitch got up, and she growled under her breath.
“You are not dead,” Terra said. “Yet, you are not dead.”
“No, I'm not. I am in a cage, a safehouse. I cannot be dead”
“And therefore, you are not,” Terra said.
“Whatever happened to you?” I asked. “You are
in pretty bad shape.”
The Russians had trained Terra in 1940, and she finally saw action in the summer of 1941. She was a prodigy, fearless. Undying loyalty to her human God. She had thought she was loved. Maybe she was. After all, that was the avocation of a God. To love. In return, she had a job to do for her master. And in eleven months, she knew how to do it. Equipped with an exciting knowledge, it was like a game of catching birds in the park. They were strapped to her back, six packs of C4. Tightened with a leather harness, she was ready.
Terra was set loose as the first tanks trundled into the theater at midnight. The smell of diesel rushed into the air, she ran for it. It lies, it lies. Why are you coming at me, bitch? Why are you coming at us, bitch? Look at the colors of the tanks, bitch! Wrong tanks, go for the enemy tanks, bitch. “I have never tasted gasoline before, but those were actually the German tanks I had to take down,” Terra said to me, a tear ramifying from her eyes. “I went chasing down the diesel tanks, the tanks which smelt like home. Panicking, my God pulled out his rifle to shoot me in my chest. A point-blank thrust into my flesh. I think I felt her hand. I yelped, and I cried. And the explosives on my back, they were set off. As a German tank pulverised my spine, my body tore into half, unable to hold together my physical wreck no more.”
The fire cooked her well, she was charred beyond recognition. She
finally died when dawn
broke for her.
The crow continued cawing, it continued cawing in the trees.
I merely gazed at the crow. And it continued cawing.
There was salt in the favonian breeze. The sun was
setting along Jurong Park - - the silence of night
was impending. I could almost hear the stars now.
I moved closer to the fresh bark of an Angsana tree,
and I curled up against it. In fifteen minutes,
the crow made no more noise. A regurgitating
body slammed to the ground beside me.
I sighed.
And I shut my eyes.
