Toby on Love

[poet-e]

I ask him, “Do you understand what I mean when I say ‘I love you’?”

He sits on my chest, sometimes lying down, or sits above my head (a paw hugging either side of my forehead) kissing me nonstop for several minutes.

He runs to my at the slightest sense of sadness or melancholy, kissing me relentlessly.

He sleeps under my desk while I work, waking to bark away strange dangerous noises—neighbors walking other dogs, cars driving past our home, the letter carrier putting mail into our mail slot—protecting me.

He jumps on my lap, surfing as I drive my wheelchair.

He waits by the door when I put my shoes on, whining to take him with me, even though I tell him “Stay home” and “I’ll be back soon.”

He waits by the door, whining to hurry in so we can make out.

He says, “So what if I don’t know what that word means?  Enough talking.  Let’s kiss!”
 

[indar]

I just watched a Nova episode on dogs that posed the question "Do they love us or are they in it for the food". An hour later after looking at everything from doggie brain scans to fox experiments in Russia the answer is---they love us.

[font]https://www.kcts9.org/show/nova/clip/do ... ats-xkpcxa[/font]
 

[poet-e]

So interesting.  Thanks for sharing!

[Tracy Mitchell]

Dogs are amazing in that regard.  They know when we are sick, lonely, depressed. They respond in ways we wish humans would.  Love this poem.

A few tidbits:

S.3 -- ". . . to my __________"  What?
S.4 -- "strange, dangerous"  -- consider deleting as unnecessary.  "protecting me" is sufficient to make the point.  Plus, most of your audience has experience with when/why dogs bark.

Love the last line.  Perhaps it might be strengthened if that were the first use of "kiss", substituting 'lick' or something else in the prior lines. 

You also might want to play with line endings to see what effect can be achieved.  For the most part, poems are build with lines and not sentences, i.e. sentences can extend or several lines, or be contained several sentences in a line.  You may also want to format this as a prose poem and see how that strikes you.  A prose poem abandons poetic lineation and adopts prose paragraph-style construction.

Just my thoughts.

Thanks for posting this - glad you are continuing the series.

Cheers.

T