Jack Otterberg

Like a Stallion in a Standing Heart

Found out she blocked me today. I don’t blame her. I lose control over these things. Perhaps that is my reason for alienation- or poetry. Misshaped by the madness of art, I walk alone; live alone; die alone. It is my duty; it is my fate. I am assigned to cross the mouth of stars. While others enter the cosmic void, the void enters me. I’ve accepted this. I have no need for your pity.

 

Somedays I wake up to the pine-kissed sky, smoothened out by thin cumuli, and think, this could be different. It never is. The same drooling hours bleed between the clock’s two hands. The same phone calls, notifications. YouTube videos. Sweaty naps. I’ve accepted this as fact.

 

Maybe I’m getting at a sore grapple—how can I revise my fate? Is there a delete tab on God’s keyboard? Help, I am answering my own enigma. I am connecting the frayed edges. Electricity runs through me like a stallion in a standing heart. Only to falter. Only to limp.

 

Yet I still love this undulating race— the smoothness of others’ words never soaked into mine. I wake up at the price of living. In my sleep I am the happiest. Then the meditation of hills, streetlights, backpacked students. I can’t be both alive and happy. Somewhere down the palpitating universe, an alien fiddles with a violin of stardust. He prepares my elegy, winding and bursting, from his metallic throat. I am ready to be touched by the ghost of life again.

 

I can hear the moonlight whisper to the roofs, this is the finale.

 

I can feel my heart lock in its cage, and stay still, forever indebted to the world it loved.