SHORT FILM ~ The Barking Horse

I had a dog

His name was Horse
He’d come when I call.
Sometimes fetch.
Sometimes roll over, play dead
Sometimes shake your hand.
Sometimes.
He’d have been a doggier dog, I know
had he a doggier dog name.
One day he ran away
And while away
I’d hear the song
Of my missing dog
So out I went, calling his name
my lost friend the barking Horse
So this woman, this woman I love
Said, “Such foolish things you say and do.”
It’s not foolish for the ones you love,
Said I
But that day, or seems
he went away, away for good.
So I got a cat I named her Mouse
She ate the fish I called Bird
The neighbors, too, were confused
I called them friends.
They used a different word.
One day I said to the this woman,
this woman I love.
If I had a white horse
I’d call him Brown Cow
Just so I could say,
"How now horse Brown Cow?”
So this woman, this woman I love
Said: “If you don’t know the names of things
How can you mean most anything?”
In my fit, I said some things
Then some things I should not have said.
And did not say the things I should have said.
And so she went away, or so it seems,
like my dog, the barking Horse
Of all the things left to say
I have only one wish I wish to say
I’m sorry in the way words do not convey
And I'd say all those things that I've saved up
If only this woman, this woman I love
Would find her way back to me
And help me find my barking Horse
So I could call this house a home.

- Patrick Sheridan