Make Death Die Horse’s head like a planet young moon between its ears I could tell a hoofed story in its shadow one to rough up jesus buried beneath the parking lot gravel, drag out wings on a piece of Olmec jade, make a crown of rain under a widow’s pillow construct you a grid of mouse bones to contain one incredible coincidence (like being here singing to you this moment.) Now I touch the boundaries of all things with the luminous membranes of my tongue & I tell all& I play all on a trumpet skull resonate a fugue that tightens like a tree of smoke down the long tube of grass-built bone & out the nasal cavities & out the teeth a double scroll out the fiery tunnels of the breath. I found my horse scattered in mid-canter a foreleg flexed in a river his skull in a block of amber. I found my trumpet in high weeds near the dump of your finest city. I ride a stale horse down the stations of your breath a ghost cracks a pussy willow pod & I’m far from finished my task though it’s almost dawn& someone’s calling the cops. My hands take onthe color of the rain & steam rises upfrom the horse’s skull like a blanket of lace. My moony face grins from every mirror in your house. I wear a crown of gnats & a leather patch over the pin-prick in my heart. I’m dressed in a loony skeleton someone xeroxed from the Encyclopedia Americana. I light the fingers of my left hand... black flame makes you sleep... Quickly I rob you of a cup of beer & a potato cut in half. When you awake a dead bird will lie flat & copper-tasting under your tongue. A child’s good morning kiss will make it live. You will shout "The locust is a loud-mouth!" You will smell horse shit under your pillow. Don’t blame me. I never amounted to much. My photographs were designed to fade. I was the nondescript...the never understood... the barely tolerated... asleep...(the third from left)...back row. I chased down every hot kazoo every city siren, but found no wisdom to speak of. I spun tin wheels dinted by buckshot chewed Browns Mule till my teeth turned brown. On a dare I popped my eye from its socket in order to see heaven & forgot to put it back. I cried out in joy & pain but the God of your Fathers told me shut the fuck up. Now my name rots like a cotton mouth in high weeds & I hold the pitchfork that killed it in my hands. When I first climbed the black horse reins heavy in my fists hooves tore half-moons in the dust a low storm rumbled in the west & the electric charge shook temblors over the heat-crippled corn. I touched his ribs with my heels we slammed through panes of space; down twenty years I cantered. The black horse fell to dust his envelope of ashes studded with purple lights. You conjecture that the horse I rode was something preternatural but my witnesses contradict you. & You conjecture that I am on some secret Presidential Mission & reach for the wings on my shoulders but I guide your hands lower, much lower, to the rattlesnake skin belt I bought in New Mexico to my boots worn down at the heels from walking in the golden wake of Greyhound Overland Cruiser 827-1 (after getting kicked off for stinking of Tequila). I tell you... no long-shanked bride can touch my jaw with one hand & touch my boots with the other... no Mad Gasser from Mattoon can drag this trumpet from my lips. & I cannot stop & you will not stop me as I tell all & I play all on this trumpet skull. My message beads like a sugar drop down a tooth pick to your triangular gape: Isn’t it difficult to live when were dying every day? (I stand naked, laughing, pointing out the scars...here...here.) If you want to know my name throw a church key over my head. If you want to know my name knock 3X on the stone of Old Hickory. If you want to know my name look it up in the telephone directory. My true voice shattered, a block of obsidian dropped between midnight & dawn. Come near, friend, comb your fingertips through chips & spalls. The cuts come so fine & quick... cuts so subtle you’ll barely notice them... till Harvard historians annotate the red drops on the deckle pages. Can you break open a rock & find my face inside or kick over an old stump & see my flesh turning into rags? Can you walk the length of a government hall without getting stabbed in the back? Can you bend down in the heat & hold the weight of a 3-legged horse on your knee & flick the sweat from your eyes with a thumb & cut the world’s hooves light & flying & fit the ruby glowing shoe & strike the nails true without laming the world? Can you muster the stamina to hoist cocktails while prudent children starve? I know that if I dream of an iron penis my first-born will murder me as rust murders iron; & if I dream of the sky’s destruction I will surely die in the rain. Once a car knocked me out of my shoes I lay running on my side for half a day. Nobody looked down. Finally a Menominee asked me what are you tracking, brother? "A strong dog named Weakness," I told him "That, & my horse." I sit naked as the weather dressed in the skin of my enemy. I wear it -- tailor fitted-- until it rots off. My anchor & ga ga girl tattoos & scars of crosses & flags slough away... the benevolent mildew of my mother sloughs away... the flaccid sorrow of my father sloughs away... the shame of my bought-&-paid-for brothers & sisters sloughs away... I lean on one clarified shoulder in your doorway & watch the rain fall like 7 crowns from 7 heads. I tell you, truly these are the heavy days when the body reclaims itself from the mind & blood creeps through stone & lung & bone keeping the old wounds fresh & ready for the new blade. So you dismiss my songs, Capitano, & point to the end of the line. You hire me for a morning & fire me come afternoon. You balance on a brick & shout in my face. Give me $5.00 & demand $6.00 change. But I have stepped down from the burning spiral, washed my hair, brushed the bee from my lips & plucked the comb from beneath my heart & sent it tumbling into the fire. If I am a child I am older than a handful of dust. If I am an old man I am younger than a scratched concho shifting in your hand. How isolate the telling fragments polish the regulus until it blinds the eye with reflected light? How explain to you this life spent watching ice & iron & fire destroy a dreary quarter of the globe? Water striders… teeming on a leaf rotting in gloom mites on a quill in a cave static & dynamic in turn. Somehow we know some sleepless witness sees, hears is about to address us all/ but prefers -- merely -- to sing: My loves destroy me but I do not complain more than a crow coughing in a leafless tree more than a headless horse found in a midden heap. A sudden light bites through the horizon where men & women crack chaos from their bowels & clench death with a sphincter of steel. My laughter turns cold as the shaking of scalpels in a nylon bag. Now my mount stands before me on black, gigantic legs. It is time for me to go. Don't tell your children about me, Don't let them admire that I peeled myself back to sockets only & jaws merely & empty screaming space, they might burn your barn & turn your pigs loose. They might slit your tires & taste their mothers sweat. I tell you the blood bead you sell in the marketplace of a sleepy little emptiness is mine -- I lay claim to it for my descendants -- a world hangs upside down inside it, Make death die.        Back | Next