The Forgotten Birds

Forget birds.
All they want to do is sing, anyway.

Draw flowers out by lizard's tongue;
leave them language pooling in their blooms
with a hundred words,
a thousand subtle shades
of one feeling, a pollen of blue starvation.

Don't walk on the wet grass.
It will pack the earth, stunt the roots,
and then you will have to take the same worn path every day
until screaming seems normal,
and the sun comes out like a gaudy so-what.

Some asshole called me "sir" today.
Don't set prickly lettuce in a tourist trap coffee cup on my table
and call it anything but what it is--
weed and kitsch.
Do you know what this is, this skin-trapped life, this leggy vine going on?
And where is the gardener?
Lazy absent bastard.

I have a second-floor window box
five steps from my bed, if I still bothered to get up.
Every morning, the sun rises out of it,
facing east as it does,
a cemetery of little plastic sticks, evidence of the ghosts of myself.

Forget summer.
I wish it were winter, cold and dark as a banshee's hair in the wind.
Forget that stooge, hope,
forget her face and your garden homage to her;
forget spring's vacant creeping stupidity,
forget May.

And forget birds--
they only want to sing anyway. 
______

for Marian's music challenge at Real Toads, today featuring Jonatha Brooke.