In progress (need suggestions)

I am going to break my own cardinal rule, here, for a minute—
And use the term “soul” in a poem.

(Without, of course, it being related to how happy a black man wears his skin and floppy cap, or it being related to the way spinal fluids reverberate under the breath of a horn. These kinds of soul, are, of course, fine for poems.)

I have to use the term soul in this unacceptable manner

Because it wasn’t just with the muscle under his forehead-skin, or the little dangling ends of his lung that only fill up with dying breaths, or the pucker of cords that allow him to tense his nuts but with all of these things at once.

This horse believed he was Pegasus.

He looked at me, lifting the chain-mail veins on his eyelids to expose the wrapper-white around those eyes, like chocolates I wanted to pop into my mouth to subcutaneously absorb their caffeine (his soul.)

And he told me, he said “They got me.”

“Who got you?”

(Well actually I said “Holy fucking shit! A talking horse!” and then there was some back and forth, but let’s pretend I just took it with a scowl and a little twinge of the nipples and skip ahead to the point where I adequately screwed the cool back into my molars)

“The hipsters. The Olympian Hierarchy. People who read about physics, but who aren’t physicists.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you”