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Category: Dog

351 • Take-Away (5)

351 • Take-Away (5)

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Today my old dachshund, Delphine,
Dropped dead in this trendy canteen.
‘You can say au revoir
To your Michelin star,’
I said. ‘So much for Nouvelle Cuisine.’
NOW BRING ME A CHICKEN CHOW MIEN.

The human spirit is infinitely resourceful, it seems. Unwilling to succumb to the grief that typically attends the expiry of a cur, our narrator turns the event to advantage, knowing that – once the press gets hold of the story – the reputation of one more pretentious ‘fooderie’ will be irredeemably trashed. Who wants to eat their supper in some joint where canine corpses are scattered about? Or in a restaurant that welcomes living dogs, come to think of it?

338 • Assassin (2)

338 • Assassin (2)

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The one time I served Jack the Ripper
He’d come in my shop for a kipper.
With his dagger and cloak
He seemed quite a good bloke
Till he slew a small poodle named Pippa.

Society encourages us to think badly of a serial killer, yet one recognises this shop-girl’s guilty admiration for her celebrity customer, flaunting the characteristic costume of his profession. Here Jack’s conduct, while admittedly uncivilised, is readily rationalised, inasmuch as any domesticated dog – especially the scion of so ornamental and unnatural a breed – is already Dead to Nature. Had the fish emporium chosen to host a free-range, genetically unmodified cur, the self-styled ‘Ripper’ – like any common-or-garden customer – would doubtless have been torn to pieces a good while before the completion of his intended purchase. But it’s easy to be wise after the event.

304 • In for a penny

304 • In for a penny

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The last time I met Ezra Pound
He was dragging a bobsleigh around.
I said, ‘Waiting for snow?’
And he answered me, ‘No,
But my husky was recently drowned.’

Remembering Pound on his 135th birthday, the person in the street thinks of him as the tone-deaf, fascist crackpot who repeatedly published translations from languages he did not speak. Were his chums right to have him committed? Traveling by bobsleigh (if he did), yet keeping but one husky (if he did), might suggest a certain imbalance. As early as 1958, however, he declared that ‘all America is an insane asylum’. We shall not look upon his like again.

279 • Ax me another

279 • Ax me another

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This ax I acquired near Mauritius,
A purchase both proud and propitious:
One night in the smog
It destroyed a small dog
That might have grown up to be vicious.

Here we are again with a canine spin on the timeless, and deeply tedious, sophomoric conscience-tickler, “If you could travel back to 1946, would you destroy ‘The Donald‘ as he lay puking in his gold-plated crib?” To which the only moral answer must be, “Let us set sail for ‘near Mauritius’ immediately, and acquire a job lot of these proud and propitious axes.”

233 • Escapology

233 • Escapology

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What joy to live out in the park,
And skulk in the bushes till dark!
Then catch cocker spaniels
To fry in Jack Daniel’s,
And start forest fires with one spark!

The Pastoral Impulse has a long and healthy history, but this outlaw’s short-sighted manifesto merely catalogues the reckless and ignoble impulses of a vainglorious deviant from whom any genuine Noble Savage would recoil with contempt.

212 • Dogged

212 • Dogged

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The store on the way to the station
Was manned by an outsized Alsatian.
‘Pray, are you a grocer?’
I asked. It said ‘No sir,
You’re having an hallucination.’

The products of our imagination often seem programmed to mislead; but as this instance shows, we should study to ask them The Right Question … in this case , something like ‘Please may I have an apple and a banana, in a brown paper bag, to sustain me on the journey up to town?’ It is seldom appropriate to challenge a shopkeeper’s professional credentials.

208 • Body and/or Soul

208 • Body and/or Soul

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There are Driverless Cars in our town.
Small wonder pedestrians frown:
One went for a jog
With her Bodiless Dog
And a Riderless Bike knocked it down.

Just as Modern Man has dispensed with the idea of the soul, so his cleverest machines now rove at large without their once-crucial guiding hands. Emblematically, in this Sunday’s searching parable, we witness the extinguishing of a Spirit Companion (easily the best kind of dog, in that it does not slobber, yell, bite, excrete or fornicate indiscriminately) by exactly such a futile, mechanical zombie.

207 • A Grand Scheme

207 • A Grand Scheme

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As I sat, with my cat, at the vet’s,
Where a ghastly, huge dog with Tourette’s
Snapped and bellowed and whined,
A Grand Scheme came to mind:
Euthanasia For Other Folk’s Pets.

All true … but let us not be too hard on dogs; it’s so easy to see them as unruly embodiments of all that is vulgar and vicious, and to forget that the cur’s owner in this cameo may feel correspondingly ill-at-ease with the little cat – threatened, even, by the placid decorum with which she awaits her final summons into the consulting-room.

065 • Crufts

065 • Crufts

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Distressing to learn that your cyrrh
Is severely allergic to myrrh:
I’d procured a supply
To be flicked in its eye
And smeared on its foul-smelling fyrrh.

Oh the Brits love their animals: some huge dogfest, The Crufts, starts this morning. Sure, there’s a hint of cruelty in this ironic rhyme, but it’s nothing compared to the indignity of enslaving an animal for life, in order to harvest the adoration you have so little hope of garnering from your own species.

049 • Little Ned (finale)

049 • Little Ned (finale)

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Tonight sees the funeral feast
Of Ned the Chihuahua (dec’d).
As principle mourner
I’ll crouch in the corner
And hurl chunks of Pal at the priest.

One might well have passed the redundant stocks of dog-food to another pet-owner, but pelting the ‘priest’ (ie the creature’s sobbing ex-proprietor) with it is a much more cathartic option. [See also here]

038 • Little Ned (3)

038 • Little Ned (3)

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That coroner’s waiting till autumn
To start on your puppy’s post-mortem.
Well the later he gawps
At Ned’s pitiful corpse
The sooner I get to report him.

Maybe I did nothing to make Ned’s brief life agreeable; but I can certainly compensate by a vengeful attack on the slothful bureaucracy that thinks nothing of delaying his funeral. [See also here]

027 • Little Ned (2)

027 • Little Ned (2)

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Please note that your puppy-dog, Ned,
Has lately been shot in the head.
Our Desk-Sergeant, Marcus,
Can show you the carcase.
No further light will be shed.

I didn’t get on with this dog, I admit. But I never wanted it to come to this. And the tone of the police memo, specifying their callous Desk-Sergeant merely by a chummy forename – leaves a great deal to be desired. [See also here]

016 • Little Ned

016 • Little Ned

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Please note that your puppy-dog, Ned,
Is banned from the marital bed.
Henceforth I expect him
To lick his vile rectum
On top of the wardrobe instead.

Ned is long gone, mercifully, but traumatic memories remain, not least of this memo’s over-stern wording. [See also here]

015 • Bleeding

015 • Bleeding

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One thing my life sorely lacks is
Some nostrum to quell epistaxis:
To limit the gore
That I trail on the floor
And the bloodhounds that follow my trackses.

Every citizen has a dripping wound, acknowledged or not: nosebleeds are the least of it. So much genetic data surrendered to malign agencies – not so much the hounds themselves as those who presume to marshal them.