Humans & Horses Read online

  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

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