My heart is a dog (Demo)
By Odder & OTR

Somedays my heart is a bicycle chain 

and my brain 

and my brain 

and my brain… 

Some days 

My chest-cage is a bee cave and you can curl your fingers under these honeycomb ribs 

pull them out, taste them, licks like thick liquid sweetness. Don’t be afraid. On those days, 

there is no stinging here because this hive is too alive and busy dancing two-step code I’ll tell anyone you know where the really good pollen is.

Some days my heart is that stupid fucking dog, 

that barreled out of one back door, down two back-roads  and into one busy four-way intersection for the simple joy of running, and fast, with brain in pursuit, screaming like breaks as heart’s helpless body slams double-stumble-bumper-barrell-roll, sliding  asphalt sideways into a moment of complete, concrete silence… Just to shake it’s head,  get back up and run again. 

Only to be found hours or days later shitting in some strangers yard or trying to mount a poodle. 

Some days my body don’t get off so easy.  

Some days my brain is a razor blade camouflaged in tentacles.

Somedays my heart takes refuge in a pile of warm clothes 

just to find out when the doors slams closed, 

it is sitting in a dryer set for a hea vy load

Some days my brain leaves my heart chained-up “bad-dog” out in the back yard and night attracts heart-attackers; wolf packs of insect-eyed teenagers crawling out of suburban gutter bad-trip, head-sick with hormone-drone and ego, cast their jackets over my heart’s living chambers and beat it till it’s beat-less, until it stops barking, shits itself, and offers up it’s wrists to cardiac arrest. Then them wolves drive out into woods and  the pup who wants to bill himself  as most milgram experiment soulless Crashes his mother’s kitchen knife through my heart’s fragile atrium again and again until my ticker uses it’s last bite to tear off into the night and find a scrap of moonlight it can dress up it’s death in. 

Some days 

my brain is that obedient pup, wondering up 

at the next night’s serraded winter stars 

 while it’s savage brothers sleep, thinking:

 ”what have I done and can I forgive myself?”

Some days my brain forgives itself.

 and it dreams of riding strange machines naked,  

howling at the thunderstorm that swallowed up the super-moon. 

Some days my heart is the bicycle chain

 and my brain 

and my brain 

and my brain

 and my brain

and my brain is a feedback loop 

My tribute to the late Maurice Sendak, from an All things Considered interview - Music is Mahler’s Symphony No. 2

Let us speak now of doubt… 

My  doubt, she is a gardener. 

She came for me by summer, 

all garden gloves and good intentions 

And planted this hell in my belly in the noon of drought.

My doubt she left me, with this free-fall feeling that she left me, 

All trashed cat in cardboard,

 Watching the pounding winds of highway ‘I thirst for a purpose’

Applaud the hole being burned in the ozone of my ribcage

In the shape of:

 ’what exactly am I doing here and does it really matter?’ 

And my doubt she whispered “No”

“It don’t matter how neat you plant rows,
all your crops will grow  up to be ashes some day, 

And someday will be the last day anybody ever says your name again.”

And when I despaired in this fact, In this doubt, I told her, I told her, I said:
  ”Doubt, you are no gardener, you are a gravedigger and an arson. 

You left me no water, no seeds, only this ‘no’ answer, 

and then the cancer of regret packed and rolled up in my ego,

But I take it, I take it like tobacco packed and rolled into asbestos 

And what lungs are left are as ragged as Basdrop, 

You can probably smell them the way in San Marcos

But I can still use them to gasp in this graveyard 

Gripping black loops of bootstraps in finger crooks rattling throat tattered madness that:

‘You can’t just decide my backyard’s your boneyard, 

That is not how this works, 

I got this bone-sack here, I it’s mine!

And I’ll make it into fertilizer

When I so please,  that’s right I got me

 My  own self-destruction all  

planned and plotted out!’ ”  

But doubt she shook her head no, 

and she said:
“Boy, put down that knife and put out that cigarette. 

We already done enough slash and burn here…

And you knew I was coming, 

You had been all this time standing 

On the wood plank you got   

 Straddling the six foot hole between obligations and your passion

 Just so you can spend too much of your time 

Navel gazing into blackness,

Let me tell you, you are letting your obligations die,  

and passion stretch up to jump in after them

When you’re lucky just to be here,  

In other words, we got some work to do.” 

And I said:
“I sure as hell know that, 

I got these words in my head to engrave on my headstone:

Here lies….of omission have gone into labor have given birth
to the rotting truth that broke this boy’s shoulders

like load bearing beams of this mausoleum 

It seems i still call my greenhouse, 

even though I know better 

I just can’t let go, I am just like my father…” 

And so I am all this time standing on this 

cracking wooden woulda, shoulda coulda

all false promise and last cigarette 

Shuttering bargins that:
“When this thing breaks,

Just push the dirt in quick so that I know that I am gone

and then I swear to you I swear,
I’ll give my bones to whatever flowers that you or my mother like.”

She said:
“Baby, shut the fuck up for a minute,
you are not listening and I don’t got time for another funeral.

What I am telling you is It don’t really matter what we grow here, 

So come off that ledge, 

So take this till, 

And just dig the dirt you’re growing in for a little while.” 

“But I hate this job.” 

“Then work for love!”

“But I hate my self.” 

“Then grow for love!” 

“But I hate this system, this country, this concrete, most people!” 

“I done told you love was work, boy.

You just gotta love what you work for, for the sake of love itself,

And then what love work for you. ”

And so I said thank you 

And I took the tools I needed, and left the ones I didn’t. 

and it is gonna be a long and scorching summer folks, 

But now at least I am tilling. I am tilling the ground.
And I am in love…
I’m in love with my doubt.