Caroline Klocksiem
Ridden
Looking at us and making that face, like future,
black night keeps breaking in through windows
it’s already in and always been in. The stabof the moon: that lonely dog,
that punk star struck and stuck
in black her long hung face of want
fawns over our street, through the chain linked
fence, regifts what she takes. Night, essentiallyshe laps up, rearranges, remakes, even
my big red bra gets dragged through the dark, snapped
from the clothesline, spat
and scattered into bright red scraps, starring the yard.The black mouth of sky purses and flirts
and pouts. Moon’s yellow slit tongues
and pants: now the doorjamb,
now the key- and peephole, now licks
clean the tiny rips in our sheets we can’t
even feel. The moon, electrified, won’t be ridden. TonightI want to learn something entirely new:
my lips to go giddy and my mouth giddy-upped in hot pink,
trotting out firecracker blahblahs in bed, sparkling
and always watched. And you play the boywho even in dark flickers like a red
hot on the tongue, or a wet
leather whip. Your headall spikes: self-perpetuating flame of tongue, teeth
all fang and yellowed claw. Silver piercings like black moon-
glass breaking through your nose and earlobes. A boy whose headwhines during sex, your whistling breaths
as if the heart cries out through your nose,
ringing a sharp tune—the rhythmic soft screechlike a bowie knife stuck in a sharpening trick
its blade endlessly pumped against wetstone. Whole chest heaves,
fence of fur and howl of tattoos:
the lame cobra watching from your skin
a faded titty-bitch, and dull and wrong
commands of ideograms going gray. TonightI either want to join them, to climb you
and hang there, pale and shut tight or I wantto ride you exactly the way I’ve been practicing.
Exactly the way the dark,
like the sleek black wolf, seizes and rides her land,stamps it out cold, remakes the blades
of grass and stones, rearranges her territories
beneath, ever knowing only now and go.
