Featherhorse

You’re just a featherhorse—
you’re no “Pegasus”.
I can see the paste slopping out at the creases,
wings that don’t lift or flap,
and if I’m wrong—
leap off that precipice
and fly.
I hope your feathers have dried!
Or that some swooping fart of Zeus
will catch you in its craw
and steal you off to heaven.

Goldenboy is long gone
with that hideous head—
but the blood still gnashes
at the earth like a cicada brood.
The monstrous corpse,
crocodile torso
quivering anciently—
looks almost human,
almost a goddess . . .
or maybe a dead-papped whore.

May the gods bless her—
holy muse and mother to us both.

You. For all your plumes—
there’ll be hard-heeled riders,
horesetraders jabbering of shanks and sheen,
grimy palms assaying your balls,
twitching to nail iron to your soles,
spurs for those wings wanting to be windspun souvenirs,
a succession of hands at your nape
tugging you toward the next glorious
“Arising”.

You would be better off
fat and hairy like me,
big footsteps, broad hands—
free to drink at leisure from the clean rivers,
recline against the green of the hillsides
where the winds sit,
free to watch the dawn rise up
and forget it as soon as day.

Huge and free—
no heroes, no breakers, tamers, or golden bridles,
too giant, too wild for the wants of men,
useless, utterly useless
and invisible to them all.

Everything I am will end up on some stump of an island
pinned beneath a volcano or left
miscellaneously where some asshole
can forget his murders into it.
Memories will die in me,
die around me.
Memories cannot survive the ones like me
(there are such ones . . . but you wouldn’t know).

No eternities.
You can have your eternities.
They’re just another leather throne
with straps for equestrian fingers only.

You
can grasp nothing.

Blow off then—
but when you’re done stomping and braying,
try to tell somebody my name,
try to tell them,
if they come upon me in the woods asleep
to go and roll a mountain over me . . .
if they think they can.
You’ll see what use you really are.
Your oblivion is your voicelessness.

Mothers and muses . . .
Just another encumbered atmosphere bearing down,
and below it, not even an Atlas,
but a railroad spike, flat-headed for the hammer,
I will sink each year
three more inches through the bloody clay.

When I am swallowed
absolutely into the belly of this damnable world . . .
Vicious Old Fossilmaker . . .
you won’t even remember
I was born your brother.

[see note on this poem]

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