It isn’t technically a nose ring because
it’s open at one end, more like
a nose horseshoe really, which I
guess is what the willful young punk
bulls would be wearing given
the chance, you know? So you could
still look tough sporting jewelry that
makes you fucking bleed when you
first try it on, but nobody can tug you
around by the nose anymore, no
way, you’re a cow in open pasture now!
When the railyard wakes up and yawns,
this entire warehouse growls in a dream
-splintering, resonant belch in the anticipation
of trains, her brother from the mountain’s steel clay.
Did you know that there are vampires in
Montana? Because I’m staying with one here,
we know each other from back in college! &
have you ever noticed how weird it is that
vampires are basically parasites, and like
other parasites (i.e. malarial plasmodia) they
need permission to enter your house and
exsanguinate your sorry dumb corpse, so
they use the voice to trip up your shitty
Barney Fife immune system, your fickle
personal boundaries, and pass through
the threshold of your liver waving the
RSVP in your sorry dumb corpse’s pale face,
belching up blood burps by your side
until you are reanimated as an infectious
agent, turning all of your friends and family
into sorry dumb corpses, you dumb asshole poet.
Listen, I’m sorry that the conceit of this poem
is about comparing you to a bull, it’s just that
I’m in Montana and there are a lot of cows (and
I like cows, for the record) and the only other
metaphorical creature in this poem is a vampire,
and it seemed like calling you a vampire would
be way worse. It isn’t some convoluted bull dyke
joke, I swear, and I do like your nose ring, it’s just
that, you know how recently reanimated protagonist
vampires always try to compromise on their
satanic bloodlust and negate the literal death of
their humanity by preying on cattle at night
(except for Blade in the comics, who is straight-up
allergic to animal blood, but whatever),
as if they were really all that great when they were
alive, as if slaying cattle for their own sense of
purity like some dweeb from Leviticus? And you
know how in the beginning of Dracula Jonathan
Harker is just so utterly fucked when he gets
locked in the count’s big vampire warehouse that
he looks like a moron for pretending he’s not
going to end up as a sorry, dumb corpse by
the end of the evening, and it would be
way more dignified if he just lay in his bed
like a patient gazelle reclining in the maw
of his lioness? I just think that maybe we were
like that, (the cows I mean), and there
all of these delusional, puritanical satan corpses
sizing us up like rations, and like the septum
nobody knew your name until they started