HUMANS & HORSES
or
How I Kicked the Habit & Learned to Love the Gun
or
STILL
A serial poem by
Logan Ryan Smith
Transmission Press
Sacramento ⸙ California
First Electronic Edition
Transmission Press, Sacramento 95816
© 2018 Logan Ryan Smith
All rights reserved. Published 2018.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the author, except where permitted by law.
Also by Logan Ryan Smith
Poetry
Bug House
Stupid Birds
The Singers & The Notes
Fiction
Enjoy Me
Western Palaces
My Eyes Are Black Holes
Y is for Fidelity
TABLE OF CONTENTS
poems listed by first line…
Two-face,
It wasn’t an hour of silence
At the racetrack
At the sound of the gun
At the
You bit
To wit, you have none, yr
The greyhounds get to race
C o r r a l l e d
The sense that this can come off
It’s not a sprint. It’s a marathon.
221 years ago and sometimes
Dear Love,
I’m thinking of you, dear friends, who came to yr end
As I crawl out of the drink
I’ve got the poison
I’ve heard you like to put on flippers and squawk? Like
And the horn sounds!
A laugh out the window
So when I put up a stage
handed
When I was a kid
In elementary school
I learned about Orpheus
There were no horses
I couldn’t calculate the means of an end ended there
Off course
A cool
No big mouthed waterbirds
Yr say
For
Eight bells rung
And the Earth is infected
Forcing my way out of the waterbird’s big fat red lips
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WORDS ABOUT HUMANS & HORSES FROM HUMANS…
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
for Eight Belles,
dying to come in second
“The on-call veterinarian stated Eight Belles’ trauma was too severe to even attempt to move her off the track”
Bring on the dancing horses
Headless and all alone
—Echo & the Bunnymen, “Bring on the Dancing Horses”
Two-face,
to space,
too
wit.
Accidents in the face.
–Perhaps I should begin
with
the
end. Bend the tension
at
the bit. Pull yr head
back
a little
bit,
make yr teeth t u r n
r e d .
Called the “horsey-ness of horse-faced sense,”
you’ll be on yr own side
for the rest
of
yr
life. Peacefully fitted
carried by it
and burnt
biting the bit back and flinging it at
the nearest bystander who’d
just assume
never have
seen it.
Yr face, that is.
Again
toward the finish line with those horse teeth
(splitting
the photo
finish)
and horses spit
and horses shit in a bag
and the way it somehow always ENDS in a race, no matter
what
was at the BEGIN-
ning. Some singing birds, perhaps. Some caged parakeets
bouncing arounding in their steel caging, ringing the thinging.
Some blue and grey parakeets, some yellow and green parakeets,
by a shade-drawn window, with the summer-morning-lawn-light
working up against it. Bees at the wildflowers. And the birds in their cage
singing to the ringing they make. Bouncing and rattling,
flittering and flailing. Chirping and beeping, squawking
and making
the whole living room awake over an orange shag carpet
and quiet
record player.
Seconds quake.
The whole small house to pieces. A dream
isn’t fake. A horse isn’t a museum.
But the climb
is yr countenance, yr sense of it, yr ability
to count(er.) On. Climbed. Soured. Grapes.
Yr piece of the pie at the breakfast counter. Yr
face
not
in
it
yet.
Better get to the line.
Time to make a bet.
Ready.
Set.
It wasn’t an hour of silence
left
to beget. But it was this. This
was
ours
to set the hours by – is what the clock meant.
The turning digital
minutes, a turning digital sense
to collect. A way to run with it. To balance
against
the pendulum of calendars and dour cardiac arrest. The
greatest
test
the heart
can meet. The beating
against
the chest, such timing in a cage, spent. Spent time
in the ribcage
till
the end. However much the cardinals sang
in the end, the cardinal rule was to ring the bell
to signify
the end. To let the other gather their self. To let
them get up
under their own will, or with help. To let the
bloodletting
be stopped, cleaned up and stitched. To fill the room
with
red wings
dropped
from the ceiling. To fall asleep on them
and never wake up.
At the racetrack
in the grandstand
calling out
to the blazing horses
yelling out
the sounds of names
just learned
hoping
to earn
a few
lucky bucks
the ducks
in the lake
beyond the track
are crowded
by the sound
of hooves
coming down
like the
steel wheels
of the train
so they flap
against the water
till the water spouts
below them
and shoots up
and over them
because they’re rising now
above the lake
behind the tracks
to find a train
to wet their beaks
to get the fuck out of there
At the sound of the gun
what you’ve yet to
you will have begun
again
the circling
of the pen
the pent
up steam undone the gun
at the end
quiet
and cold, steely, so story left
unsaid
no semi-colon placed
without
a
period. The cards in place
of yr face,
Jack. The cards in place of the place
where I placed myself among the
hous-
es.
How I became the sound of the gun
in the sunset.
How I became the sound
of the gun
in my city,
leaving behind a trail of smoke
and ringing,
the singing
of the sound
of a start, undone. Gone. Long gone because
the sound
of it was
after
the action
of
release. Can’t grasp at it,
unless yr timing’s on. And it’s off. Yr
off
yr rocker,
carrying the sun to yr father, yr father to
the sound of explosions, the explosions to
the space
between a set of ears,
a pair of pear trees,
and the skittish deer with blackbirds at its feet. You can’t
begin
to begin the accidental squeezing
of a trigger. It’s not
about
to be. To be,
or not to be
gin again, the genes in yr system setting
out
yr plan. How again you plan to recreate, procreate,
masturbate
and begin a gain.
To gain. To gen. To better the world:
A planet. To span this accident. Cover it.
Crowd it with others, with what others
would herald. The buried dead, strangled. Covered
in cobwebs, saddled like horses. Brought out
to pasture and placed next to a hole
in the ground
called ABSENSE. A hole in the ground with no
end. A hole in the ground just black and dark
and there.
But, come again. We’ve crafts to make out of them.
I squeezed their heads
for glue
and used their skin
for paper. We’ll walk all over the dead
in our
artistic fashion
island
down the cat
walk
where the cat strikes
at the black
bird
striking the hard
ground
with its beak
till it breaks
or the feet
of the model
kick it
from its place
off the dock
into
the waves
to empty out
the ocean
or
to feed
the fish’s
sea men
At the
sound of
the gun
the shape of
a body
takes place on
the ground.
The sound of
a
gun,
could be any
thing. The shape
on the ground
could be
any
one. Who knows? Who-
ever
delivers
the sound
of the gun
could come
from any-
where. The bus stop,
the zoo,
the shop on the corner, or
from
nowhere. How come?
You bit
yr lip
on accident, just
a little bit.
You, yrself,
heard
yrself cry.
Just a little
bit. You put yrself
in a bind
and now you taste
iron
on yr tongue,
just
a little
bit.
To wit, you have none, yr
out
of it. My mind
at the start
was something like a fish
for a waterbird’s lips. I could hear
only
the speak of it, could understand no other
fish
or blind person in robes or cornered
animals in cold white rooms. Only that
of the floppy
waterbird
with bright red lips, sometimes hidden
by bashfulness, the wings in front of them,
throwing its voice. The big white waterbird
in the big blue body of water
pushing me under
with its words, saying, You will drown
by the thoughts
of yr mother. And pushed in
to
water
my lungs washed out the mucus
my birth left in them, and I coughed
into the waterbird’s breast,
marking it
before it brought me to its lips
and threatened
to swallow me. The bird told me
I wouldn’t be allowed
to come back to it
for the rest of my life.
I was left, a stupid newborn floating,
having trouble making out anything
with my freshly wetted eyes all a blur
for the memory to rewind later and not remember
precisely, or how I knew,
right then, left floating by
my fatty
body
to learn
how I would grow older
and larger
away from the waterbirds
only
to continue
to get stupider.
The greyhounds get to race
without any person pulling them,
riding them,
or beating them with a stick. They get to go after a
plastic rabbit
until they quit.
Which they won’t quit,
quick,
till it’s over. And it’s not over
until somebody
gets it,
the rabbit,
so it doesn’t stop,
ever. And everyone
in the grandstands
watching
will get tired,
or sick,
and die in their seats
waiting for it. They’ll turn to rotten flesh
as the dogs speed
round
and
round
after the whirring buzzing chirping plastic
rabbit. And then their bones will turn
to dust
and the sun will set
on what
they might have been,
what they could have been,
what they used to be. And the dogs
will run
run
run after that rabbit, as the sun
comes up
and down
up and down and round and round the dogs
will whip around
again
unable to catch
the mechanical rabbit,
unable to stop
and bury
yr bones.
C o r r a l l e d
into the pen,
which is bullshit,
you don’t even use them. Too slow
for yr
dull
skull. Pro-
hib-
i-
tive. Pastoral non-
sense. The sense that you’ve got to get
to it the quickest way
poss
ible. Yr head
right in
the game. Right. How’ve you been? I’ve nearly
neglected you. Nearly pressed out the space
between yr eyes and called you out. Nearly
worked yr face
off of
mine. The genes in yr
name. How carefully completed,
how planned
yr
escape? God in the accidents, the sentences
of yr fate for the grave robber’s calling. Perhaps,
when we started,
the hauling off of pieces of bodies,
we thought
we were in
for it. Thought we’d found our
occupation. In the state of place we called
ourselves to
by picking off
what’s left to us, and the ground. How about
we call
ourselves out?
Wipe our mouths off with the soiled rags? Black
our eyes
o u t
with the shovel? Cut our
selves
down
to
size? How about a pint,
round the corner,
in Ireland’s fist? The green rolling hills
of dead bodies
stacked like barrels
next to pubs. Then we’ll get back
to where we started. After a drink or two. You
and me.
Getting faced off
this stuff.
The sense that this can come off
as a
fresh
start
is the sense that this is yr house falling down
under the weight of hail
the size of crystal balls. You’ll grow organic
chemicals
in yr basement and breathe them all in
to become more than yr not. Watch now yr
windows breaking,
the cracking of yr walls. Yellow and green.
Plastic birds fall off yr shelf
and cheap
glassware
is broken
when the earthquake breaks yr foundation.
Don’t stay in the basement playing the
re-
peat
game. Don’t stay out of the races
considering yrself an elite
and fashionable stud
with good gums
and strong teeth. Don’t let yrself fall
from the top