hire a poet

one time i had a dream that one pooch was so bored that he hired his own private jazz poet to entertain him. his name was bigley.

bigley, that dog, would sit and listen to the accoustics and the crazy lines that the poet would spin out of his mouth. tales about unbelievable travels and memoirs of all his long gone friends who had gone bust or gone down because of drink, or lack of sleep, or over erudition. he'd tell bigley about his former job in a factory and all the characters that lived there in a mixture of blue collar misery and small scale triumphalism. and he'd tell bigley about all the jobs he was going to get like store detective for a chain of department stores where he'd wear a tan raincoat and pretend to shop -but actually he'd be looking around to see who was gonna lift a pack of smokes or steal a chair, or maybe throw a white feather pillow under their big winter coat that they wore to keep out the arctic air, and walk out of the joint and lay down in a rickety little bed with crumbly stained sheets in a paint peeling apartment, where you could hear the water in the pipes when someone flushed the toilet down the hall, or maybe a high class furniture maker who would fashion elegant pieces out of wood that people would sit down on and feel so comfortable it would make them feel regal like they were running the world, or maybe he'd be a numbers runner working out of a candy shop as a cover for all the free floating cash, or maybe a fisherman in iceland where he would fall into the drink and catch pneumonia.

he'd tell bigley of all the girls he wanted to meet, or that he had met and how it always led to break up, confusion, and bad feelings all around, and how this one girl had him go half insane. and he never knew if she was in love or she was just kissing him just to pass the days and the hours while they kept looking for the next adventure to happen. and it did and she picked up and moved to nebraska, and his musical ambitions started to flop, and he flipped, and he spent a month or so upstate, until he figured things out enough from reading nietzsche and aristotle and st augustine and drinking cheap cider because he was in apple country up there.

and bigley he would bark and howl and the jazz man would howl and bark right along with him like it was part of the music and he had arranged it that way in his head in pre-advance like he was a little mozart living down by the hudson.