The Master of a Hundred Hounds (A poem #21, 1964)

Advance: In 1964, being 17-years old, my poetry had changed a little, to a more profound philosophy form; in that year I can only find two poems left, that I wrote, where the rest are, no one knows, anyhow, #20 “The Unattested Echo,” and #21, “The Master of a Hundred Hounds.” These two poems were put into my first book called, “The Other Door” (1981, reedited and revised) The poetry after these poems, came slow, a few in Vietnam, and then I started back up writing again in the 1980s, a newspaper in Minneapolis picked up about ten of my poems, published them, and then onto the 90s, but I didn’t reach a large amount of poems in those years, up until 2001, I had only written about 250 to 400 poems (many of them misplaced), in comparison to the 2200, I have now (1/2008).



The Master of a Hundred Hounds
(The Vine’s Soliloquy) Poem # 21 (of 2174-poems)


He swam with his kind,
Sighed when they sighed,
And had become the master of a hundred hounds,
—a pilgrim of Evil—
As the masters before him.

As he walked, others carried his load—
this was not uncommon of his foe, yet
Forward he trusted oppressed,
Insidious, more entrenched;
Forward he became repugnant.

He slept then with toiling thoughts,
Hoping for their extinction,
But they did not (there was little time left).

Then the master upon awakening apostrophically cried:
“Oh, but there is no God.”
Then talked of days past:
the wars he never fought,
the heroes he never knew,
the ideas that were just there.
With all of this—He
hallucinated,
burdened with logic;
Yet he could not conceive nor digest,
For he knew, he lived it!

Then boasting of only one regret—that being,
The loss of breath,
He emphatically screamed in a personifying characteristic:
“I, the master of a hundred hounds—I am!”
The standing sullen and erect, he wept (there was so
Little time left).

Thereafter he removed the dirt from his eyes,
Wiped he dew from his lips,
And with a murmur, substantiated his deterioration.
He knew now he had run before he learned to walk,
for his legs did not obey,
And on reflection had followed teachers who never
taught;
He knew now hey were the thinkers who never walked,
(He knew now, time was very short).

Ensuing, a tempest of catastrophe flooded his cerebrum;
Insofar as his title became an overtone.
There remained nothing of his own.
He then called to the dawn and daylight; as a result,
light was laced upon his dynasty; now,
Opening his eyes for the very first time,
He knew for he very first time
The dreadful closing of them.

And to his descent he left:
the dampness shed upon is lips,
the blisters that swelled upon his thighs,
And the sand that covered his eyes.