The Dark Bird

 

Behold the dark bird,

new as a fresh injury

old as antiquity

spreading its wings 

bespangled with collected eyes.

Millions cheer the dark bird.

empty sockets over their grins

like twin red suns

over a planted scythe.

Behold the dark bird

in all its majesty and power,

its feathers tipped with blades

and blades are most of what it is,

wounding all, even itself.

All hail the dark bird

whose spread tail obscures

the east, its head devouring the rest.

Kneel to the dark bird

and behold in its bones

your own grave.

_______________

Music: Cream Deserted Cities of the Heart by Jack Bruce and poet Peter Brown

Incantesimo

In a cage with bars of foxfire,

I kept an apparition who claimed

to have made, from flax and piano wire

your nom de guerre, your midnight name.

"Tell me, moonless one, " I said,

"Sunless, starless nattering ghost,

Is there gravity for the dead?

A superseding circle outermost?"

She moaned and split to sugar and salt

identical in paleness to your kiss,

and offered a platitude neatly got

from a serpent poisoned with nothingness.

I burnt a root and bled a bird,

a canary-colored silent fake

whose solitude was ringed by words

that only my love or the damned could make. 

______

for Skylover's word list.

Pumpkin

I told Pumpkin
about your heart--
how it couldn't be broadcast, even locally.
Is fucking finding? No.
My life, yours, Pumpkin's,
are like collars fitted to only one neck. 
Right, girl?

Pumpkin is poemless, unlike me.
For her, shit is shit;
she's not sentimental.
She finds dead hearts, shakes them apart--
comes home looking pleased. 
______

A flash 55 for my BFF.