"The Misfits" Revisited

When you chased, lasso-ed  the mustangs,
Tying hooves to necks of down
Weighed by tires heavy as trucks,
You wrenched the galloping out of me
Till I found my rage...

Butchers!
What is the spirit if not these horses
Wild first to last, these zeniths, comet-
Tailed, free as the sage, the mountains,
The thousand miles of it?

That is me down there in the dust.
That is you who can not see yourself
For the sign of dog food dollars,
A cowboy’s wage, the dream
Gone to blood.

Put my blood on your fingers.
Lick clean. Let whiskey drown the taste.
The taste will come back, the beleaguering 
Fever and freedom here truly trotting
Beyond your ropes which shake and shake.

Lost boy, lost cow poke,
I will be gone from you now.
I left when you started
Though you didn’t quite realize,
Stoking my hope on the fire
Of your kindness, that blaze
Where you just might
Change your mind.

If you do it, do it not for me,
Mare with a foal’s faith,
But for the stallion within you,
Misfit majestic and dying breed
In this age of the slaughterhouse.

Farther Than Fantasy

Beauty or Beast, which are you today?
I have known both, have occasionally been them,
Thus can see how much they’re virtually no different.
Ferocity, tenderness...
No, whatever love cages isn’t quite either.
Did I say caged? It’s more a trust, well-earned,
Setting free Jericho's’ walls while simultaneously
Keeping that habitation wherever wandering
Finds its street.

Myths, fairy tales and legends...
They riddle our lives into maps,
The destination, shadow flickering from the looking
Glass, its other side. Voices call from there. 
Whose?
These mirrors smoke ingrained with a faith of prescience
Near to pain.

With your weight a knowledge, still, central as memory,
I can stumble & not quite mind or, now’n then, even fly,
Finding the kindness of an animal & the wound of empathy,
That mortal thing it most fears losing...

Who would believe this?
The malice-eyed wing watchers raising their chalices
As if preparing to spit? Or the white rose, our familiar,
Changing color amid thorny voluptuousness?

Yes, though strange, underestimation is better,
Caution, a heart, taking to the wind & seeding it, reborn.
This is my last chance, incarnation &
By magic horse, glove, key, I mean to come back,
To pass where silver veils ripple and bubbles thaw ice:
The looking glass, the looking glass...

Listen, here is the place where we’ll shape
Our faces around crevices & melt in a vision
Returning anima to spirit.
That’s what we always were.

Stolen Hearts

Helping you escape was my penance for God’s lie.
No, not God’s, but humanity’s:
Improper, contemptuous, their guilty scapegoating needs...

Why did I believe you that day, reading my bible
To you through the bars? Oh, people will say
It was loneliness, say I hated my warden husband & fell
Sway to your eyes. Not exactly. That’s too pat.
What you wanted was one person to see
You could kill no one
& then there was me.

I didn’t understand at first, neither of us did,
How a person’s faith may exchange places with another’s
Until both are transfigured by the single combined light.

No, I did not hate my husband &, if lonely, only
In the way many people are: through the silences
Of marriage, through the lives lived as expected & not
Comprehended until perimeters are fixed
& patrolled, patrolled...

How I breathed by such a pace, using Christian belief
For endurance, & how you told me your lack of it
After being dealt another cage.

Weeks went by & so what if I was being used?
Condemned to desperation, how else can trust be thrust
Forth but by measures of equal risk-----
A saw, a file...

It was I who stole your heart or why else
Would you come fetch me? Excess baggage, faith
Rearranged & on the run through nights of snow,
Trains, an abandoned mule wagon...

Oh Canada! Freedom! Tasting flight, open
Air & some farms’ chain-less dream:
We would start over, our arms, pillows, our
Arms, kept promises-----
Except:
How chance betrays hope in the way posses hunt.

It didn’t take long...
Hooves, bullets, shouts...
I whispered in the thick,

"Quick shoot me here."

How funny, your lousy mark, I lived 
While you, to them, were suddenly beef,
Riddled on all fours.

Goodbye my warden husband.
What I’ve exchanged is the faith
Of your bars for these strange, these somehow
Innocent ones my lover never

Belonged to

Though once
I read him my bible

& found then, as I find now

another home here

Bleeding For Jaco

Electricity gone awry... Boundary lines blurring...
The jarring of feedback, the blisters of static
Where, from amps, scabs bleed...

Jaco, who were you? The homeboy made good?
The mutt derelict genius?

The usual labels as commentary, tragic speculations all...
We cough up explanations to digest brutality
& then remember...

Duality looks deeper. Gropes for control:
Your callused fingers cut by bass strings,
The palm ripped, a gash pouring jazz...
Physically too: the bones of your face shattered,
Having been beaten outside some pub.

Blood is a poignant reference, a vivid metaphor for pain.

But what sabotaged you, Jaco?  The ecstasy of an Icarus,
With the eyes of the drowned?

The surplus of ground zero conveys abrupt shots:
The numbing by lithium, the quarantining in de-tox.
Yet life you still attempted, blinking an eye, twitching
A toe, & Jaco,

It wasn’t madness that drove you, but bloods’ pure notes.
A virtuoso from day one, a whole improvised opus you became,

Jaco,

To rock out, rock out, as a solo