Canine Atheism

[Nemo Neem]

I am waiting for you by the door,
And I know you think I am a bore;
I ask of you, why do you think this?
I wonder why you stare at me,
Like I have committed grand larceny,
When all I have to do is go out
And do my business, without a doubt—
Therefore I suppose things don’t exist:
That is, when the top of my head has been kissed
I think it happened, but it also could not;
You don’t understand why I am lost
When my soul has no cost.

Now that you’ve got it settled who I am,
My life is nothing more than a scam.

I fear you don’t know enough about me,
Or at least unknown to things you can’t see:—
Largely, I know, it’s merely religious;
All I know is that I have to pee—
And I know I can decipher what is real.
How do you know that you exist?
When the lamplight goes asunder,
Perhaps we don’t exist!
Holden to a leash, I can’t believe—
Can I please go out now?
You friable shore with trails of debris,
Considering that you can deceive
When he takes his last bow;
When I see the squirrels running wild
And with the dragging of the dirt,
I know my feces had been filed.
I can’t believe in anything—
Hell, I’m “just a dog”
That is, as in a “boring log,”
I listen to the felines sing.

Now that you’ve got it settled who I am,
My life is nothing more than a scam.

All of the dogs hover on cushions,
I know very well I could not;
You make me sleep on a cot,
I feel like an insignificant dot:—
I see food falling from the sky,
Wondering if it is indeed for I
Or for someone else, bye-the-bye.
“If only pigs could fly!”
I know I was born in a flower-pot,
Like a blazing planet grown,
My ears held up by push-pins,
With all the time that has flown.

I can’t engage in scientific matters,
I can’t think rationally—
I live my life stubbornly—
I am never served any platters:
And all you do is malinger
While you read J. D. Salinger.

I am haunted when the feline scatters,
And when the humans preach religiously—
I am nothing more than a mighty guess:—
All they care about are pancake batters.
Shall I beg to you and confess?
Do the felines worship us doggedly?
I lie down, I suffer with duress.

And when the humans mix their batters,
When the cats sing their melancholy songs,
(I can see the spinning of the logs)
Could you unwind my riddle
When the cat plays its fiddle?
Or when the itchy flea scatters
If the shampoo can caress?
I want you to pull the leash’s trigger.

So I sit in the metallic prison
And wonder whether I could be them—
Those dogs on the flying cushions
Or in the kingdom under the sea—
I prefer not to.

The silent man sleeps on his side,
Facing the eternal pyramids and their magic—
My life is something tragic!
With kings and counselors he died!
And what do I assume?
A canine’s life is total gloom!
All of the food, it is fried!
Science does not have all the answers,
Not even Martin Luther and his friars—
It is true, nothing I can believe in!
I have heard that a dog can sin.
How is that possible?

In Neptune’s waters, I must paddle,
Otherwise, I will drown,
And maybe, perhaps, you won’t frown;
The sea will be my tomb.
I regret coming from my mother’s womb.
Why don’t I put on Rozinante’s saddle?
I shall enter Charon’s evil ferry.
You control me with the leash!
Allow a dog to fight his battle.
Do yourself a favor and eat a peach!
Did you master the doggy paddle?
Go and make your cats straddle!

When I was a spiteful puppy,
I had dreams all dogs have,
To fly on those magical cushions
Or pee on the furniture,
And now I have no future.
“Bad dog,” you say,
Each and every day—
A towel is now my grave,
But I could have imagined all of this,
It all could be a delusion.
Is there such a thing as doggy bliss?
Allow the cat to hiss.
Why do you get angry when I eat the trash?
Why do you smack me with the newspaper?
Is my life nothing but a caper?
All dogs go to heaven,
So they say, but I want proof,
I won’t find out until I die—
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly,
And she, yes she, will die.

I met a dog from Andalusia,
And he said, “Did you chew your bones?
“Do not fear the wretched Brom Bones—
“Only can united teeth crack them,
“And all dogs must be united, then—
“To conquer the dreadful pen.”

The soaring dogs do not listen,
And the cats sing their melancholy songs,
While the food flies above us,
The humans throw a fuss.

I am a believer in nothing,
A paw on the ladder of science,
I am a useless appliance.

[Nemo Neem]

Nobody has anything to say about my poem?

[MorpheusSandman]

If I'm to be honest, this was a bit painful to get through. It's overlong and the forced rhymes really make me wince; especially with lines like:

I see food falling from the sky,
Wondering if it is indeed for I
Or for someone else, bye-the-bye.
“If only pigs could fly!”

and

And all you do is malinger
While you read J. D. Salinger.

The secret to using rhymes is to make them disappear and merely become part of the music of the poem. You can't do this without a keen ear for poetic rhythm. It doesn't help that you seem to constantly and arbitrarily change rhyme schemes without any kind of consistent meter. It's an interesting subject but it just meanders too much without any sense of narrative rhythm. In any semi-long piece there is always going to be some kind of story being told, and here you're expressing a point of view on life from a dog, but it just seems to senselessly jump from one observation or theme to another.

Two major pieces of advice I'd offer: One would be to dump the end rhymes or, if you insist on them, sustain a meter. I'd really recommend most poets practice with alliteration, assonance, and consonance more than rhymes because they all have a similar effect but are often less intrusive than rhyme is and provide an internal music to the language. Two would be to really shorten the piece of. When writing poetry always think about SEX or Simplify, EXclude. Poetry is about saying the most with the least and the the longer the piece, the better poet you have to be to pull it off. Having written a short narrative poem myself (and being very negatively critical of it) I speak about this from experience; a mere 100+ lines requires a supremely astute, conscious awareness of all poetic devices and how to deploy them to the work's advantage.

I'd recommend practicing with shorter forms. If you want to practice with rhymes, write some sonnets. Learn to use the structure of a sonnet for poetic expression and how to create lines around rhyme schemes rather than getting married to a word and then twisting another line to fit it to that Procrustean rhyme. When I write sonnets, for instance, I often think of, say, a trilogy or quartet of rhyming words that I can fit into the piece. I do this BEFORE I start composing it so I have a flexibility and, hopefully, it comes off more naturally because of it.

I hope you don't think I'm being too negative or overtly critical. Poetry is a craft that must be learned and practiced to be mastered and criticism is the only way that we can become conscious of what we need to work on to get better.

[PeachesPieces]

i agree with morph' on the rhymes. the subject matter of the piece is excellent and i love that you use the perspective of the dog to convey the meaning. one other suggestion that i have, and its really just an opinion thing of mine, but i would kind of like to see each stanza organized a bit more into a solid subject matter that links to the theme but has its own meaning. but, with a little work i think this could be a jem!