FROM The Last Great Adventure Is You
How Borges felt about hexagons
is how I blꚙdfell horses. Though they are lost
the moment I begin to skun
them, I could never ask for another
kind of music. The horses I choose
never listen to the horses I’ve become,
& just when I get close, all change direction.
& astronomically.
& I’m trying to love a little
cruelly. & I'm trying.
To love simply, but when I open myself,
the horses go mute & breathless. I roast their bones for supper, spill their blꚙd
as wine
upon the heavens. Believe me, when I blꚙdfell myself
upon the bloody pulp of this page,
I've loved each & every & it was always real.
But the horses it has cost me,
the grooves in my heart
this has sealed.
*
Let’s not skin a horse & wear it together.
Elsewhere I have to say no. Elsewhere I can't stand
the magma plume of death::orse
pooling us against
each other—
Like moonhorsen awakened too early under the skin of the artic.
Elsewhere there’s no more song of how far you'd go
to covet & flay
the :: wildUnplace ::
{of its AntiHorseSpace}—
Here you'd kiss the mezuzah & skin the horses from my breath.
Elsewhere I exhale the little graces & skun a home
just as fortune hunters arrive with first snow.
All we hear are weary horses within weary door.
To not skin will make us thin & mutinous
—& the horse is many & you
won’t let me go, or leave
this elegy alone
& on the loose,
with bloody teeth
& bloody hooves—
I'm no perfect moon, with perfect swell,
but polar gravity drunk on the spell
of purple mountains laurels—
Elsewhere a single raven is circles
intertwining us both & you
inhale
me
as if your spoils
to impale & expose—
& all that's left to hear
are bloody horses
snared in bloodied year—
:
:
Here you grace the mezuzah & lead horses
away from my breath
Here you can't skin home
without calling us
::Death::—
& I say no
to phantasm of farmstead :: longhouse :: box-bed
I’ll drink no more from wicked chalice
stolen straight from two-faced lips
nor hang
map :: portrait :: parchments
to cover all the doors
broken in your head—
only for the sulfur clouds of Venus
where a single day is longer than its year
would I give {this skin}
I'd endure the frozen side of Mercury
& breathe the gas rings of Saturn
if it meant I could return to you
the kind of darkness in which nothing survives
until it skuns
some new planet
right here
in this solar system—
a cold
{cold}
distant no one
has seen it
as you'd tell it
an army of bloody hooves skunning curious &
crimson
as if my death had never not risen
Wrestling Your Heart-Shaped Box for Weeks
No passionfruit stays intact for its own sake.
Perfect. Puckered. Thrown away. Or ends
up in the humanlike hands
of a raccoon the city has yet
to catch. I will forgo how we got here.
I won’t tell you how a social distance can stretch
since I should probably be dead. If honest about chances I did
not have & those I’ve taken. Truth be said, I ate the passion
but the fruit got away. Because forces are known
through their interactions. Because in making
connections, I knew, going in, both of us
were going to lose, anyway.
These times make causal
an essence. How today “IRL”
is profane— if a city’s to chase
a bandit with a net of frayed mesh
& rusty grip— while we were sheltering {ⁱⁿ} -
over a screen— I mean
I can’t not abbreviate the hyper- of this forced
reality. I’m trying. I’d like to get back
to sitting on benches, sharing breath
-cheeked. Wind-skirted. Knee-to-knee.
Chancing. I still mean the troubled grace of taking
for granted. When alone & not thinking each moment
could be an uploaded view. Subscribers. Avatar. Revenue.
Not that you & I are part of this,
but just as guilty. & a guess
via algorithms. It’s cost us
warmth & concern to connect.
It’s gone on longer than this
pandemic. It’s how we stay
intact & near- strangers,
how ⁿᵃⁿᵒinfoᵐᵃᵗⁱᶜˢ has. {ˢᵗᵃʳᵗ﹗}Up
& ᵗᵉˡᵉchanged. ᴹᶦⁿᵈˡᵉˢˢintegration
&. ᵐᶦᶜʳᵒDissemination. In the dark even my littlest
deaths can’t help. Turn.
Institutes &. Fabrications
of less-wild raccoons freeing
a million kilowatt & impassioned
froots from locked & chained
garbage chutes. I vow both the raccoon
& I have masks, & either could be the more
reliant, this is true, I believe
they terrify me
& wake you, my neighbor,
to walk with me.
We don’t remember when it started.
How keeping six feet safe
increases yearning.
It’s just it won’t do
a “damnthing” when we come upon
their grizzly bottoms sticking
up, stalking for day-old
crust & magnetars & sweet gamma beginnings.
When they rise up, catch us watching,
I know I’m so far
from everything,
no matter the pull of a given
interaction. I keep my phone lost
at home, yet. Solitude
turns to sequencing. You’ve got a new
complaint. Blocking these little. Beasts.
Entrenched in a different. Forecasting.
Efficiency. Expertise. Patent. Demands giving
chase to. The city spares. By accident these days. So runs
rampant. True. False. Not applicable, isn’t it, doesn’t it seem ALL
{ᵈᵒᵒᵐ doom ᵈᵒᵒᵐ}—
a new
{kind of}
:: ! 4D ! ::
ᴴʸᴾᴱᴿ⁻ᴵᴹᴾᴱᴺᴰᴵᴺᴳ⁻ᴴᴱᴿᴱgloom—
*
One of us wakes up. One more
drenched. This bench in a humid
garden stings. My head steams in
your warm lap. Curl-stuck. Shirt split
opening. Nose slightly exposed. Shaking.
Muffled. You want to ask. We both know
it’s too soon. Three
passionfruit. One too many
is two for you & me, & the last
for the raccoon
who’s known
to expose his face
in the middle of the day.
Not in one’s nature. Not anymore. I’m trying
not to hearsay. But the situation. When you soothe
you follow me on social
& caught so many perfect flat-lays
of bisected mangosteen & guava cleaved
exposing seed on the cleanest cutting
in wood & mist while on your way
to temporary hawkers
beneath our train
& what are seasons anymore & patience & half
-running a single hope I’d still be here
at the end of some rope— ᴵᴿᴸ—
I'm trying to tell you. I’m not sorry
there's no formula, no equation
to forgo the lips,
but not the hand,
so we can climb
right back. What it will be, I can't
promise. Or ease. & that's not
holding at this new length
unblemished,
smooth,
obtuse.
That's me telling you
the truth.
What Did I Do to Deserve This
& it’s the most ʰᵃˡᶠhorsen thing to try to stay
{half :: human}
by making excuses. I’m not ready to leave
just yet, haven't
the faintest idea
why, say, everything that fits me is still a little too big,
always a little too long in the sleeve
so my cold hands are always warm.
How did this sort of thing work itself out,
while, never mind the season, I'm reaching
for the top shelf, the flag on the mountain,
a ladder's last ring, friendly hand lifting me,
squeezing onto trains, humans hold the doors for me,
as if not taking up too much space is a good thing,
the best thing, half-step
not yet open-
lipped
joyous, a second lit
at the tunnel's end? As if thy neighbors
will return to strangers, in the way
trains derail, whole families go missing,
sock lost in a laundromat, mere nuisance, forgotten,
move over, kiddo, duchess, dame, & so what, & what's
more they get a little trigger happy, sure, have issues, reservations,
party of six, minus one, they still grieve
& cross countless county limits & walled cities
to spread happiness, wildfire, weeds, virus, preach
always someone else is a demon & the lay of the land
insisting upon itself as how things, all things, stand.
I never knew where I fit in. I drag my feet
through sodden sand & roll up my sleeves
which still fall into the water, the oil-slick,
tin-canned, six-pack-plastic expanse
in which I'm still making excuses,
asking for forgiveness in endangered
speech, my cold hands growing colder,
so far from whales which know not one world
or two but three— and yet another & can't imagine
ringing
through the outer spheres that brought you here.
If I ever stopped believing, would love itself die
a little, which might not be
just a little, just another day I'm carrying
my bone-dry raincoat over my shoulder,
bunched up, between
forecasts of heatwaves & hurricanes, a great
flood, the world ending, if you could just see
how I’ve seen dying roaches & dry creeks, & the dirt beneath
earth::orses' feet, ants who never sleep
amid the apostles' catacombs, & fields
& fields overrun with magpies & locusts,
even if your most loving touch could not save
the bones of ancient equine now extinct,
if again I had to almost die
for you to get to me
a little too late
I'd still listen for you,
in this sea-leaving
pull I can't quite
perceive, this no-stars
breaching the sky, & there's no sea I've left
which you've not uneased, this
wherever time goes, you & I
& what last stars I away
will bind far
from them static
& plain say what
last stars die I have
been to have died
anyway