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The brutal white horses with painted-on faces
Are riding their circles, riding
Dead air. The dead air is hanging,
Is ridden with riders and glued-on red
Saddles. Crumpled hoofs in the dead-on air.

The wild glare of the brutal white horses
And the crippled gold manes tossing
Dead air and the two girls who ride them throwing
Their kisses from high, battered foreheads
Through the thin screams of their stringy red hair.

The brutal white horses are riding their circles
Veering in terror from painted-on ropes
In dead-earnest air. The ropes that suspend them.
The brutal flare of their painted-in nostrils, the brutal
Whirl of their unfurling manes in the painted-on air.

Their paralyzed mouths the yellow bit snares,
Their petrified stares tapped by flies riding air
And they’re riding in silence, glassed in
By air and the two girls who poke them
Dead in the eye and pound their fists on
The painted-on flanks, are beginning to cry

For the brutal white horses don’t bolt or whinny, don’t
Ever die, but ride their dead circles, noses on high,
The dead air upon them, the painted-on saddles
And painted-on reins, and painted-on lives. What mind
Would have them, circling and glassy, immune
And frozen in perpetual alarm.