A horse has jeans on up to its neck where the waistline is tight so its mane remains concealed under the seam of denim
and all the way down to each hoof where the cuffs of the jeans are also tight. The jeans have pockets covering its thighs and the pockets carry buckets of change.
So much change you would think it would be too much to carry but the jeansed horse is so strong that the change is weightless.
The horse gallops everywhere huge sweat stains soaking through the jeans salt lines etched like lightning in the denim. The jeans get grimy, taking on the texture of a cowboy’s, the real kind
not the Hollywood kind, all threadbare and faded and gross but the fabric holds.
The jeansed horse prances through heaven its big stupid meadow of empty beauty change shaking in its pockets like cosmic maracas.
Did I mention how huge this jeansed horse is? There’s more change in the pockets of its jeans than the wealth on earth. Galaxies poof underneath its hoof-falls like dustballs
when it thunders down out of a rear. Black holes kick up in its wake as it sprints, snorts and nebulas fire from its nostrils, leaps clefts between clusters of stars, etc.
A single coin from its sail-like pockets would flatten the sun like a sewer access cover flattening a grape.
What you hear between your ears when all is quiet
is the aggregate jingle
of all that change shaking into itself
sound neutralizing sound in a giant equation in the darkness of its pockets
as the jeansed horse trots, lopes, canters, wanders everywhere, etc.
Knowledge lovers hate this revelation. When they inveigh that this myth appears too infrequently in the record to be weighed respond with a shrug
say you want nothing of knowledge
of the already known. You have been to the spot the myth began. You have seen the sounds birthing their words. You have given with your ears the hooves of this horse their very shoes
as the psychic lanterns of the jeansed horse’s eyes open endlessly on seas of sawdust darkness!
I remember seeing a meme featuring a horse with jeans on up to its neck, and I think I had been reading Coleridge at the time. Somehow the two cross-fertilized and the poem resulted. "The Jeansed Horse" will also appear in the final issue of "jubilat."
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"I try to develop a vision of the poem as a crystalline structure, to see the points, often images or nouns, in the structure, to see the energies, sometimes prepositional, sometimes sonic, sometimes emotional, that travel between and among these points in the text, and to consider the way the light of our attention might play on and activate the multifarious connections."
