Otron and His Dark Horse

Sometimes, I feel like writing my own obituary. I grab hold of a bottle and spin in circles, the living room’s recessed lighting hiding the wrinkles on my sleep deprived face. Later, I jump off the roof of a strip mall, plant my voice in the parking lot. My dark horse and I board up shop windows, casting a tragedy of bank seizures, a mannequin with a wallet in his mouth. We resuscitate the victim with pillow talk, a hand for his member. Wading through vomit and the bodies of a thousand burned birds, we make candles from steel & watch angels yearn.

*

Sometimes, I feel like writing postcards to dead neighbors. I grab hold of a pen and spin letters into an awkward “hulloo!” for the beyond, a nightingale song for eyelids the color of leather. My dark horse and I take shopping carts through the KFC drive-thru and point out Jupiter using our cell phones. We threaten the pony ride outside the supermarket with a switchblade, ask for all the change it has eaten. My dark horse laughs, asks for a tattoo of night on his body. We hold each other and twirl until we both vomit fountains of glitter from our ears.

*

Sometimes, I feel like painting a glow-in-the-dark skull on my dark horse’s back, an ink stamp I’d use to find him. We reach into potato sacks, pull out mane-wigs and he wears them beneath a disco ball made out of horse glue which makes him feel queasy. He traces bull’s-eyes on his flanks and the whole city starts chasing him; they paste horns on their heads and wear red capes before they fake flight around the Erie Canal into Arizona, the one place my dark horse refuses to go.

*

Sometimes, I feel like taking walks when my dark horse doesn’t. He says, “gimme your keys, I’ll take the truck,” and even though I wonder how he drives, I give them to him anyway, only to get my truck back with ten parking tickets, one photo-radar, a bed-full of hay, turds, a carrot for a snowman’s nose, and two dents on the passenger door. He tells me, “choir children were never babies.” My dark horse and I sip lemonade in the Catskills, eat lamb hearts, and wonder when canoes became so large. We stitch nightgowns to our skin and dream in patterns.

*

Sometimes, grief is too much for my dark horse; he wastes the day at his salt lick, brooding over the sunset’s lack of color. The world can’t be as voluminous as the nebula he’s from. The gas clouds, the harmony of matter. Whiskey sours don’t cheer him up. He whinnies with a noise maker, shoots up dope, and vomits on the hottest mare in the pen. He has a chance to escape, but he’s belted down by being.

 

Dean C Robertson lives and writes in San Diego, California. His work has previously appeared in Best New Poets 2011 and So to Speak. He is a Contributing Editor for Poetry International.

 

 

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