Our dog Mina, as some lucky souls have experienced firsthand, sometimes exhibits a hacking cough. The cough, impossible to ignore, is the result of heart disease. Before you go feeling sorry for her, please note that thanks to hundreds of dollars worth of veterinary care and medications, her cough is managed very well, she is happy and pretty much doing better than all of us. Taking long naps in the sunny floor patches of our dining room. Stealing whole halves of sandwiches from helpless children because she is sneaky and quick.

She is simply going to continue to cough from time to time, as well as need to be let out approximately one million times a day, thanks to her diuretic. So what you can do, is start feeling sorry for us.

In order to cope, I took to poetry, which my father compared to the "deconstructive poetry of the modern nihilists, echoing despair which is the true reality of man." Definitely.

Love you, kill you, what?
Your coughing is so damn loud
Little dog Mina

Psychiatric care!
I can't live live this no more!
Emphysema sound

Watching Mina sleep
Love swelled, until I noticed
The urine leaking

And one from Justin:

A cough and a cough
And a hack that's mostly retched
Yet nothing comes out