Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me. A dog poem

Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:

1. My spoken voice
2. My raw poems.

Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!

"Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me."


We were visiting Mom’s best friend,
An aunt who wasn’t an aunt,

She taught school, the job my mother dreamed of
Before unplanned babies and rushed marriage

Turned her life into breaths clutching
At meaning. The ladies stayed inside with coffee

Laced with Kahlua and words steaming
At the edges of truths while I walked to the lake,

My body lurching forward. Last child by so many years
Made me a lonely only and I started singing

To the waves and the trees. The water-stained boards
Of their dock made me think of mermaids and tears.

Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me.
This is why I am a poet.

The dog emerged from the woods to the right,
A Doberman. One of Mom’s men friends

Had a dog like this. I reached my arms open, hugging the air
And the dog bounded into them. From the deck of the house,

My mother screamed, Carrie! No!

Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me.
This is why I exist.

What are you? I whispered to the dog as her tail wagged
And tongue lapped my face.

When the grown-ups came running out, the dog shifted,
Guarding me from their strange worries about credit and affairs,

Husbands who might find things out, children they left
Behind them, coughing and clinging to life.

They implored me to come with them. My hand ran
Along the dog’s fur and for the first time,

I felt powerful. I found a dog, I yelled, but she really found me.
The water clung to her fur the way I wanted to cling on

To that moment. Could she have really heard me wanting,
Singing need and loneliness into the waves and trunks

Of crooked spruce trees, my sadness hooking lines into the granite
That gave our state its name? Someone’s husband

Convinced them the dog meant me no harm. She didn’t.
Dogs never did. They still never do.

Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me.
This is why.

Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.

The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.

While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eric-van-der-westen/the-crown-lobster-trilogy-selection