~Doggy-Doo/Firefight~

By WordWulf, 19th Feb 2011 | Follow this author | RSS Feed | Short URL http://nut.bz/gh2eelef/
Posted in Wikinut>Writing>Short Stories

~Philosopher, Dreamer, Madman, Jester~If you call out the clowns & the wise men of earth~I’ll clean up the elephant dung~said it once, said it twice~get that damned cop outa my room~

~Doggy-Doo/Firefight~

Last night I had the doggy-doo dream. Picking it up is a task I perform each morning. I put it in a plastic bag, use my wife’s garden trowel to scrape and lift the business from the rocks and bark in the yard. It is also the time of day I enjoy my first cigar, a Swisher Sweet with the white plastic tip, incense and cherry red glow. The morning is dark in my dream, puppy-poo and occasional green artillery fire highlights (lowlights?).
I’ve been rereading “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Crime and Punishment.” Those novels dovetail nicely (unfortunately) with the daily news popping up on my computer screen. Perceived threats of arms (really?) incite murderers to dispatch squads of children to dispatch squads of children, establish bivouacs on the killing field. What reach, these imperial monsters, their pseudo fronts, I have always failed to see.
There’s a cop in the yard seeking prostitutes, junkies, and drug dealers. Every third person, these police (mobsters), kidnap and rape, ransom and incarcerate the populace, make no sense to me (I want their jackboots and armor). There’s too much wrong with the right and right with the wrong. Money, honey, it’s all about money.
I do digress, back to the dream. It’s cold and rainy in the January dawn. My thumb aches from holding open the flame on a butane gas lighter. I’m attempting to fire up my cigar while scooping doggy-doo into the plastic bag. This isn’t working. The cigar must have gotten too wet to light. I need ignition, fire and smoke, because the wretched stench of the wet doggy-doo, worms woven through it like rice in the bellies of bloated sparrows, is rising up, inciting a writhing rhythm in my gut, inviting a coffee morning vomit. I am gagging on the reek.
Remarque and Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Hess, Jesus Christ Himself, Abraham Lincoln, Jim Morrison in my dawning rock ‘n roll years, understood suffering. They wrote to it, howled it to the masses, offered themselves up gut and groin, wallowing in its putrid mess for its own sake, what else. What the hell do I know? Ah, damn it! I’ve been trying to set fire to a turd. Peering into the sagging weight in the plastic bag, I know where my cigar is. Like those guys mentioned above and thousands just like them, I know this is not a dream. It is chaos of my own invention, intention, and will. Come the next artillery flash, I will dive in to retrieve my smoke.
~Tom (WordWulf) Sterner~
~Eagle Bumps/One-Step Men~
~Journey to Triazolam~
~The Dreadful Beautiful~

Meet the author

WordWulf
Tom Sterner lives in Redding, California and Arvada, Colorado with wife Kathy. He has been published in numerous magazines and on the internet, including Howling Dog Press/Omega, Skyline Literary Review, The Storyteller, and Flashquake. His interne...(more)