The Going

Had a line without a poem with a horse on fire.

Thought, I should write that down before it’s gone.

Worked the door last Halloween past afterhour,

reading Oliver Stone’s dour script for Conan

on my iPhone, thought about what goes unmade,

how there must be unbearable solitude in achievement.

Best not to speculate. Didn’t the Barbarian’s creator,

Robert Howard, die from self-inflicted wounds,

quoting lines from ‘House of Caesar’ in the West?

There must be a thousand big goons in a boomtown.

When a man thinks about the past, he becomes

kinder, Andrei Tarkovsky said. I suppose

it’s the look of compassion you see on stallions in public

monuments, the bowed chin, on bit, bones in

lingual tension, or behind the restrained pose horseface

Conan assumes in Frank Frazetta’s illustrations.

I practice it in flashes on the backbar’s mirrored glass –

something that can take a hit, my gait as, my heart as.

I fake I’m watching Eoghan cut gain onstage

or the Melbourne Cup on TVG. FanDuel.     

I learned the horses doing nights a yearlong,

working the door unlatched, letting Denil in again

to mop gore from his face, giving him shit, my shirt,

as though brute strength’s its own costume.

You might say Conan was a product-of-his-world like

real punters talk about conditions of the going –

the green turf goes you hard & heavy, good, or good

to firm, -to soft, soft – pliant enough to fall through

to the underage of earth, stirring in its soaked

fur like some antediluvian beast. man, though,

naked, big, and dull as I’d look in the Hyborian Age,

I could forecast a foal. I could make its book

a line without a poem like my life for hire.