Dave Bonta's short poem seems to celebrate a kind of sexual or emotional awakening, though it leaves much of its meaning to be pieced together. The opening line names desire as something with a birthday, as if it arrives new each time. The speaker's wife offers a "true horse," and riding it brings "great pleasure." The horse reads as a metaphor for intimacy, freedom, or both, though the poem never says so outright.
The images that follow are strange and vivid. A house "built high with two sticks" sounds flimsy, a structure that stands only through a kind of daring. A "bonfire of guns" suggests violence being burned away, or at least surrendered. Together they give a feeling of release, even recklessness.
The ending shifts the mood. "We go off for the same joy / and return for trouble" admits that desire pulls people out toward pleasure and back toward complication. The tone is playful at first, then quietly wry and honest, as the speaker accepts both sides of the bargain.