Pack Blues

Strays, growling around the farm, crack night’s tomb
as though to set twitching every zombie
nerve in my sleepless body, each howl
sounding more joyous, each of them ambushing
the fatted calf of lack.

For them now, all is garbled anthem,
a serial song of the insane;
and so, uncovering the closed rose of
my ear and attention’s thorn, rolling my head
away from the pillow, I’m like the old
shepherd of unnamable regret:
tethered by, and wholly conscious of the wordless
currents of the night wind, the sudden
humming of the wood’s organ.

They have stopped yelping, I think to myself,
and so, quietly they could be grunting
with glee now the neighbor’s bitch in heat has
been brought down.

But on the flickering screen of insomnia,
there’s no going back to bed, nor comfort
in my wife snoring lightly there,
nor in the memory of when the network
signed off with its hypnotic test pattern.

For now though, I should be out there with them:
hackles bristling to dismember last night’s
nightmare, leaping the frozen ditches of
the same old worries, instead of raking
up the spilled cans and gutted bags
of my wasted life.