MAD DOGS AND CAPRICORNS
By Michael O’Ryan
I often wonder what level of capacity canines hold
for narcissism / I assume theirs is much lower than
ours / and that’s ironic because much like a mad dog,
some people are blind to their own charm under the misguidance
of instinct / life is like a twenty-four hour 7-11 the way only
paying customers are allowed to loiter and there lies a lingering
threat of violence / life is like a grindhouse triple-feature the way
we’re all cloaked in an absence of light and no matter how thorough
the character development, the protagonist is always succeeded by a
new one when the film fades to black / sometimes our own development grows
lithe with time / like when it was your hazel-eyed angel on the phone and you
could nearly map the distance in her voice while your heart splintered like
faraway lightning / occasionally on some poorly-lit porch at night,
wayward strangers ask me what my sign is / they never know
what to say when I tell them I’m a Capricorn / it is the terror of the
inherent uncertainty present in the superfluid nature of the human
psyche that draws people to a reliance on the orientation of astral bodies
to tell them who they are / the main difference between a person and a
mad dog is the ability to mask rabidity once let off the leash /
I guess I’m disheartened by the fact that even a tame dog’s
horoscope cannot predict under which moon it will bear its teeth.
Michael O’Ryan’s work appears or is forthcoming in Alien Mouth, Five:2:One Magazine, Building 45 Literary Journal, Peach Mag & elsewhere. His poetry was included on Ampersand Literary's Summer 2016 "Best of the Season" list. He tweets @surfing_montana.
© 2018