Collared (poem)

Collared

How did he become the man who barked like a dog?

Immersed in the grit and manure and rot

of his role

Tackled by a brave few hitherto hidden

A meeting hastily convened in a garret

On hands and knees in mudcaked trousers

He shelters like a cur behind the village pump

and growls

“But he won’t bite,” one armed with a noose suggests

How did an eon, an epochal mass, a suffocating lack

of oxygen, turn the green to black

The forced expression of intolerable pressure

spins like a shining coin

And each beam of light it throws

Teases the mind and whispers

“This you feel behind your eyes, between your

shoulder blades,

Your hackles rise, your palms burrow into earth,

This is the language you once spoke.”

The man, collared and accused, hauled to his feet, says,

“I woke up one day, and I knew.”

Beast

The Tunnel

(2015, Stephanie Foster)