Hounded (notes)

Hounded. Beef heart unpegged, cloistered. That furious chopping, yawing, yowling. Flung sputum flecks frothed in with tarblood, hands flapping and drooling. Meaty flews and a tear the length of a scrubby neck, logarithmic concerns for the dipping needle. What rends and what floods with bile, unconscious fears pulsing at the neck veins.

The first time he had to sew up an animal’s ruptured gut his own heaved and hollowed, the blood a call to some deeper resentment – a parasitic carnivore, hunkered in the maw. Spastic contractions of a valve, bitter tongue root plastered and swollen, blurting in the dry teeth. Waiting for redemption like all undue warriors, a pit of muscled luck and tools plundered or jerry-rigged; a bone-saw and stubbed needles sharpened regularly on a bike-mounted stone, flat-end tweezers to leverage tooth from bone, saps and clamps and sutures. Gloves. Knucklepads. Pliers for heavy lifting and a bag of filthy rags, poultices, tinctures. Chalk dust and clay marl.

The sound of it and the stench, pitbull with its yellowed fascia torn and steaming in the January air. Belling and coursing, each dank and pissedin corner hides the fixer’s stool, the saw bones, God’s lonely man brought in and brought low – an office, a calling, a decision. For it is not by our words but by our actions that we are made men .

Orifice, sphincter, puncture; slop of something’s sudden dead innards as its bowels gush loss and failed will, a useless thing with no hope, no use, no power. Or its whining and keening, haggard and pissrolled, flung aside and despised, booted, a vomited caucus of better intent. Gutterdog.