Rosebud Ben-Oni
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
