Hounds on Parade
by Noel Joshua Hadley
SPREADING my palms wide for a Hollywood committee,
I will propose the plot of my yet unproduced movie
about long-eared droopy-eyed hounds howling mayhem
through a small American town.
“Picture the opening act if you will,” I’ll tell them.
Glaziers inch across the intersection on Main Street and Elm
carrying a larger-than-life pane of glass.
A painter climbs his ladder.
The mailman is out and about on his usual dog free route
while the mayors wife cools her trophy pies along the garden sill.
School children are paying the squirrels no mind
as they manage the slow droll walk past the bandstand to class.
A mason bends over wet cement with his trowel.
Not forgetting, of course, the fat sheriff,
enjoying his morning donut and a steaming cup of joe,
totally unprepared for the radio call that will,
in a few short minutes, interrupt his lazy calm.
Coonhounds, harriers, foxhounds, and afghans,
wolfhounds, greyhounds, deerhounds and otterhounds.
Hounds by the hundreds will be led
by a howling brigade of bloodhounds, beagles, and bassets,
rolling tail deep in mud before pawing recklessly
through the town’s only department store.
The aging barber will undoubtedly have his back turned
whenever puppies run past the window, therefore going mad by days end
in wild speculation of what red menace
could annihilate his town.
“It’s about the end of the world,”
I will inform the corporate board as part of my proposal.
Imagine if you will an initiate stepping out of the closet.
He is clothed in an apron and a noose hung around his neck
when hounds wreak havoc on the local lodge,
but that is only the beginning of their assault.
Hounds by the thousands and the tens-of-thousands
and even the hundreds-of-thousands will arrive
in Washington D.C., in Rome, and London
because they host obelisks aplenty
and a pee break is mandatory.
A parade route also builds up an appetite, you see,
which is why hounds by the million will not be pleased to learn
that the Bohemian Grove and the Bilderberg meeting
did not think to include a dog dish.
At the Vatican, the pope can only hope to outrun them
when they fall in hot pursuit of his pope mobile,
and a long overdue inspection of gold
will soon be underway at Fort Knox.
Some snooty Frenchman will be hunting humans
in the woods when his hounds switch allegiances.
Now the hunt is turned upon him.
Every dog has its day, which is why
the Military-Industrial Complex spirals
into full-scale panic mode, given the latest news.
Nobody is receiving next week’s Media script
because the clap-clap-clap of monkeys
in the back room is silent.
The Illuminati are no longer laughing it up over cocktails
when they are laying in a puddle of slobber,
drenched in drool.
The audience will sit back in their sticky theater chairs
chewing on popcorn and sipping soda, gleefully watching
the greatest horror flick of all time.
Disembodied Nephilim with nowhere to run.
We’re talking ninety minutes or two hours,
maybe even an extended director’s cut
of fat pawed loud-mouthed wraiths from the Middle-Ages
unleashed through an inconspicuous town
before turning their attention on the world stage.
Last of all, a Jew still sporting spots on his face
breaks into a sweat as he closes the lid of his laptop computer
from his bagel shop in Pasadena, where he runs the world.
He listens in to the howls of hell
rounding the corner.
“Oh man!” the audience will howl with laughter
at the start of every repeat viewing.
They have rehearsed the end of the world a dozen times already
and can’t get enough of the hijinks.
“Our reptilian overlords don’t have
the faintest clue what is coming!”