I crushed my deformed sonnet
under a dripping rodeo light.
My creature of fourteen lines
bled out blood couplets
implanted with flat rhymes
inside a mixed metaphor.
Everything got forced
into the disjointed body
I’m galloping away from.
I’ve failed to reveal myself
until now: within my journal pages,
I’m more horse than man
when I neigh in a forest
of redwood-high sestinas
and my hooves stomp applause
before Whitman’s naked song
awakened on a grass stage.
In the last stanza, I buck off a cowgirl
propelled
through a black ink bloodstream
resurrected on my white page.