FIRST BLOOD
Now, he sleeps
In a croissant curl;
Warm as new milk,
Upholstered in butterscotch velvet.
Is his sleep-soft jaw
Filled with fur and bone,
Teeth closing tight as shears,
Gripping, chasing
The boiling blood racing beneath the skin?
And in his stillness
Does his unseen self
Slip back to stand sentry,
Breath steaming from his laughing mouth,
Over the limp and cooling evidence
Of his first kill?
No one calling him away,
No snap of lead on collar:
Just him
The rain
Life, death
And dogness.
Or perhaps he simply sleeps,
And all sense of deep things clicking,
Promises kept
And purposes fulfilled
Is mine alone.
With thanks to Kiersty Boon. You were right.
Gonecycling (again) 
Nice reach. A poem always tries to understand or make meaning of things we consciously can only guess at. The details of the dog sleeping is a blend, to the observer of baby-softness and killer menace. Which is truer? The speaker can’t know, though the end buttons the sense that it doesn’t matter, at least to the dog.
Hi Brendan, thanks for coming to visit; I’ve really enjoyed exploring your work over the last few days. Thank you for your kind and considered comment on this piece; it was that sense of the unknowable, and our own constructs we put on things we can’t see or experience ourselves, that I was trying to capture. And you’re right; it doesn’t matter which is truer, because in reality they both are.