People hear about my daily sonnet
and say, What discipline! but when I try
to direct it in a particular
way, my hand, a dog straining at the leash,

yanks me in directions I never thought
to take, following the inscrutable
canine purposes that his nose directs,
other dogs having previously left
their own complex chemical messages,

or perhaps a burrow an alley cat
abandoned as soon as the conflicted
entity of dog and human tethered
together with divergent purposes
sent out signals of a front moving in.