The Starry Horse
The horse came out of a wound in the sky Stitched from extinguished stars And the breath of things unnamed It did not bow its head It regarded me as if I were an apparition When I touched its neck my fingers passed through frost and fire And the desert opened like a eye that does not close Peyote dreams Green lightning bleeding into veins of night Mountains rising and falling like sleeping beasts Every grain of sand whispered a tally of bones it had swallowed Cigarette smoke drifted beside me Though there was no hand holding it It unspooled in thin deliberate spirals Like a sermon spoken by a mouth without a face A dive bar in the horizon Neon buzzed like trapped insects A jukebox coughing up dusty confessions Whiskey staining the wood with amber halos Men bent over their glasses like penitents Drinking to forget the shapes of their own shadows The starry h...