"What We Know of Horses."
"And when my brother says Swann Rd. is the world,
he ignores boarded vacants, broken windows--
this place's shattered glass?
He tells me 'believe the world is a tenement house,
a pocket full of stones, a world of ghosts,
and what's left of ash and smoke after each inhale.'
I visit now that a prison cell holds his world.
Dead men circle every block we know,
thread this world with quotes from psalms,
'the sorrows of death embrace me,' 'some trust in chariots
and some in horses.'
They embrace metaphor, disbelieve gravity,
breathe in a haunted world.
And what of my brother?
Running these streets, he was a horse--
graceful, destined to be broken.
Why admire horses?
Why compare everything fast and beautiful to horses?
My daddy's generation had a saying
for men lost in the world, it was
true of my uncle, my cousin--
men strung out on horse, chasing the dragon,
shivering with the memory of that stallion gone
postal in their veins--
called them lost in place, my daddy
did, with cities buried inside them-- horses
inside them stampeding.
My brother puts his faith in horse,
and there is no map to find him now.
He tells me he inhales the funk of man doing life
and knows he is in hell, that he has
dug his grave amongst bricks that embrace him.
He-- exile, with only rusted iron and bricks bracing his 200
pounds.
Who admits this cage embraces him?
'History is written on the back of the horse'
broken by the world.
We all in prison now.
I stare this man, my kin ruined by embracing night.
Call this place a horse collar, and watch
how it cuts into skin, how the leather embraces
all of our necks.
Even as a visitor behind plate glass
I braced myself for cuffs.
This ain't Swann Rd., this burden placed on me,
these memories of courtrooms and the places
where bodies were found.
And still, I want to start and embrace my brother,
to hold him close and pause to inhale the scent of prison,
to tell him what I smell, what I inhale,
is still the body of a man.
How can a man inhale so much violence and not change?
I light my Newport, inhale.
Think on how his voice has changed.
My man, now a feral horse wearing kick chains--
unable to sleep, always on guard,
inhaling the air for prey, as if he is still the predator,
as if he can inhale death and keep on living.
Death the elephant in this world.
I imagine the other men here, all in a world filled
with a casket's aftermath.
How much grief can you inhale?
My brother tells me he prays at night,
he wants to leave this place.
But we know all his wild hours placed him
in this mural of blood.
His hunger placed him in C-block, Cell 21.
It suffocates and nothing replaces time.
'You OK?' I ask.
But he's in a place only he knows.
When he walks away he embraces the kind of rage I fear.
A man killed a man near him, placed on a gurney
and rushed down a sidewalk.
Dead in a place where no one gives
a fuck if you're breathing.
To be a horse galloping away is what I want for him,
he wants horse trundling through his scarred veins.
Prison has taken the place of freedom, even in his dreams.
And I know, this is not a 'world where none is lonely.'
And I know, he is lost to the world,
and I know he believes this--
'I shut my eyes and all the world is dead,' and I know that
there is still a strip, a place that he believes is the world--
Swann Rd., where he can inhale and be free.
Sometimes his cuffs are on my wrists
and I embrace the way they cut, and I am the one domesticated,
a broken horse."
Thank you.