THE FALLING HORSES

The Falling Horses

Ronald Reagen Ronald Reagen
Nope is a word of only one syllable
Should I mock you or imitate the motion
of a parakeet, cackle like a crazed hyena
cry the cry of a wounded harpy
worple like a maddened fly?

Now you have passed and it has passed
Passed and passing still (into the West that is)
for that is where you came from
a geographical compass point meaning Shiloh.
alcoholic falling horses and Grant
at Shiloh falling onto the falling horses.

The rotting hulks of Baltic submarines
That golf buggy chariot or yours
The sine, cosine and tangent, bizarre trig
of your fattened brainpan, now weighing no less
than 2 kilos no more nor less than 2.
Although it is meek and very, very small.

It weighs more than the Collected Works
of Marx and Engels, sum of your Victorian gents
You came to chill like cherryade
Or lemon cola, the ice cubes in your G & T
The 2+2 of political science meant streams
Of diet coke and blood in the street.

But especially so in Grenada, a former British colony.
You intended to cleanse their streets
a gin and tonic fountain they would love
more, more than the former colonial offices
the ambassador's house and the strange tropical
flora and fauna and everywhere the falling horses

The deadened brainpan, the argument of weights
the scales are tilting and tilting still
everywhere the judgement is tending to adore you
at least you kept things relatively quiet
not too quiet but relatively so
in a relativistic universe that is not bad

not too good and not too bad.
you have made time for the librarians,
the historians and the teachers
to clutch again and again. the whiskied
General, johnny reb, empty bottles of stout,
Falling horses, trumpets, blows, odour of dung and death.