Poetry by Jewel Kilcher
WILD HORSE
I'd like to call you my wild horse
and feed you silver sage
I'd like to paint my poems
with desert tongued clay
across
your back
and ride you savagely
as the sweet and southern wind
through a green and wild Kentucky
I'd like to make you my secret sun
blazing dark and red in the orchards
and I would steal away
to watch the way
your silver belly bends
and bows beneath me
I'd make you my wings
in the foothills of Montana
my lover in the oceans of the world
I'd make you my many calico children
and scatter you
across
the green memories of home
I'd be your hungry Valley
and sow your golden fields of wheat
in my womb I LOOK AT YOUNG GIRLS NOW
I look at young girls now
in their tight crushed velour
skin tight sky blue
hip huggers with the baby doll
tank tops
and I think
I've been there.
God, have I been there.
Sixteen years old and
wrestling with an overwhelming
newfound sexuality.
Parading it in all its
raw and awkward charm.
I had a pair of vintage
burgundy velvet short-shorts
that laced up
the sides
from the 1920s
and I wore them
with a tight leotard
and plastic faux pearl
choker
showing off all my lanky
leggy blossoming
youth on the verge
of womanhood for all the
free world to see
with no idea how to keep
a secret, especially my own. INFATUATION
infatuation is a strang thing
a bony creature thin
with feeding on itself
it is addicted not to its subject
but to its own vain hunger
and needs but a pretty face
to fuel its rampant imagination
humid couch
and sweaty palms
fleshy carpets
ablaze with conquest
but when conquering is complete
the blood leaves its limbs
and it becomes disenchanted
(to the point of disgust)
with its subject
who sits like a hollow trunk
emptied of its precious cargo
and left to fade
a seed relieved
of its transparent husk
to dissolve, finally
on a rough
and impatient
tongue |
