‘Goodbye Horses’ by Cal Doyle
In the end we would become more than horses, more than hind quarters
to be slapped and brushed by men-folk only five foot nothing tall, or projected
into monitors to implicitly embody the sensation one feels when drinking tins
of moderately-priced supermarket lager, or smoking that first cigarette
in the amber light of eight o’clock in the morning, or slipping into your denim
trousers after you and your secretary fucked one another senseless in some
motel room six miles outside of town in the middle of a workday afternoon. No.
We learned to speak your alien tongue. Our teeth stopped growing endlessly
into the roofs of our mouths. We became productive and made shapes
toward your towns, your cities, your polycentric urban agglomerations, and rose
steadily from the menial through the skilled to the executive classes in your economy
of all-fun, no mercy. We began to fuck missionary. We took cocaine like we took
your currency. There were, of course, foals, babies. Fences, gardens, sprinklers: it
all became very dull and whinny. Some took to painting. Some to sculpture. Some
to poetry. Some to swingers’ clubs. Some to knitting. Some to cleansing. Fences spread,
enclosed, defined. We felt the world was ending. Then you began to implicitly embody.
‘Goodbye Horses’, alongside another new poem from Cal Doyle, is featured in Issue 2 of The Lonely Crowd, which can be purchased here.
Cal Doyle’s poetry has most recently appeared in The Stinging Fly, gorse and POETRY (Chicago). He lives in Cork.