EatLoveRead.me

Funny pictures. Funny poems. Funny cats. New York, USA.

Poetry is Going to the Dogs!

Posted by

poetry-to-the-dogs funny dog poems

First it was the cats. Now, it’s the dogs.

Dogs are writing poetry. I am not making this up.

Don’t believe me? Try “Another Bag”:

Love
True, unbridled love
Is looking at what I just did
On the sidewalk
Then picking it up in a bag
I can only imagine as a treasured keepsake
Wow, the collection you must have by now.

Only a dog could have written that. I know that for a fact. We had a dog, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, for 14 years. We used 16,000 plastic sandwich bags in assembling our collection from the sidewalk. He also considered it an honor for us to pick it up.

Or, if it’s not coming out of a dog, it’s what going in. If there is one most favorite thing in the entire canine universe, it’s not loyalty, or companionship, or playing fetch. You know what it is:

Food
Food food food
Food food food food
Food food
Food

Who says a dog
Can’t write a love sonnet?

I Could Chew on ThisOur spaniel would eat anything. Anything. He’d leap at fireflies and Japanese beetles, loose pepperonis from a teenager’s pizza party, paper, and anything—anything—found on the floor. His favorite time of the day was dinner time—our dinner time. He’d station himself in front of the refrigerator, pretending to be asleep but actually looking for anything that might accidentally hit the floor. He had a three-second rule—if we couldn’t pick it up within three seconds, he owned it.

What he did for cats, Francesco Marciuliano has now done for dogs: I Could Chew on This: And Other Poems by Dogs.  It could have been subtitled “The 14 Years of My Life Spent with Cody the Spaniel.” Marciuliano knows dogs. He must have known my dog. In this collection of poems, he thinks like a dog. I’m half-convinced he is a dog. The other half of me is convinced he’s a cat.

Dogs write poems about you going on a trip. (We had to hide the suitcases from ours, and sneak him off to the kennel so he wouldn’t realize what was happening). Dogs write poems about having anxiety attacks while you’re in the bathroom. (Ours did.) Dogs write poems about taking a bath. (After you taking a trip, baths are likely the most hated things by dogs.) Dogs write poems about stampeding to the door when the doorbell rings (Pavlov’s dog, part deux). Dogs write poems about smelling everything (everything). Dogs write poems about dog breath, and divorce, and licking, and sitting, and biting, and chewing, and going to the vet.

Dogs even write poems about meeting your date for the first time, as in “Hello”:

I’m sorry he’s out of breath
I’m sorry he’s in such distress
I’m sorry he’s in a fetal position
Sobbing on the floor
But you know if I could
I most certainly would
Give a head’s-up by yelling “CROTCH!”
Before greeting your date full-speed
at the door

Yes, Marciuliano knows dogs, and knows them well. And I’m amazed he got this group to stay calm long enough to write their poems down. But he did. And they’re wonderfully funny.

And every one is true.

Image by Helga Weber, Creative Commons, via Flickr This is a reprint of an article that originally ran at Tweetspeak Poetry.

___________________________

Browse more poetry humor

2

Funny Cat Books: I Could Pee on This

Posted by

Funny-Poems-Cat-Poems-Cute-Cat-1

This is a reprint from an article by Glynn Young, originally published at Tweetspeak Poetry.

***

It’s rather startling: a recurring line in poetry that reads “I could pee on that.”

Charles Bukowski, perhaps? Sandra Bernhard waxing softly poetic?

Nope. A cat.

I Could Pee on This

Her new sweater doesn’t smell of me
I could pee on that
She’s gone out for the day and
left her laptop on the counter
I could pee on that
Her new boyfriend just pushed
my head away
I could pee on him
She’s ignoring me ignoring her
I could pee everywhere
She’s making up for it
by putting me on her lap
I could pee on this
I could pee on this

That’s the title poem of I Could Pee on This: And Other Poems by Cats by Francesco Marciuliano. You may have heard of him; when he’s not recording poems by cats, he’s co-authoring the comic strip Sally Forth. Marciuliano writes the strip; Craig Macintosh draws it. The strip has no cats; those are saved for this book.

Growing up, I was a dog person. My family always seemed to have one, usually mixed breeds. We never had a cat.

I could pee on thisMy wife and I were married four months and living in Texas when our first cat came on the scene, a kitten huddled under a bush near the mailboxes of our apartment complex. No one else was around. I put up signs saying she was found. The signs were torn down. After the kitten became an adult, a friend charitably described her as looking like a silver polishing cloth. She also had the personality of a silver polishing cloth.

Every poem in I Could Pee on This is true.

Our cat lived until she was almost 18 years old. She was one sturdy silver polishing cloth.

A few years after her death, a black cat (a male) wandered into the neighborhood. The neighborhood children, including our youngest son, took pity and fed the cat milk and potato chips. A late cold snap promised to drive temperatures below zero, and my wife took pity. She allowed the cat to spend the night in our garage.

Thank you, my wife. To a homeless cat, that’s a sign of immediate adoption. The cat was so grateful that he left my wife a present on the doorstep – a headless bunny.

The cat moved in.

The only poetry book about cats I’ve previously been aware of was T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Books of Practical Cats, which inspired the musical Cats. But Eliot wrote those poems. There’s no question that the poems of I Could Pee on This were written by cats.

Published in 2012, it’s a laugh-out-loud collection. The poems are divided into four sections: family, work, play, and existence. Which means they are mostly about sleeping.

It’s 8 a.m. and time to rest
It’s 10 a.m. and time to relax
It’s noon and time for repose
It’s 3 p.m. and time for shut-eye
It’s 6 p.m. and time for siesta
It’s 9 p.m. and time to slumber
It’s midnight and time to snooze
It’s 4 a.m. and time to hang upside down
from your bedroom ceiling, screaming

This is a tell-it-like-it-truly-is collection of poems about cats and by cats. At the end of the month, Marciuliano is publishing I Could Chew on This – poems by dogs. At least there will be some balance.

Except with cats, no such thing as balance exists. Even a book like I Could Take You to the Taxidermist: And Other Poems by Cat Owners still wouldn’t be sufficient to counter cats.

Cats rule. And they know it.

Photo by pedrosimoes7, Creative Commons, via Flickr.

3