Crowquill
Nothing's so lucid as the promise of dreams,
But these pills we found just make me sleep.
There's nothing quite so pure as the written word, my dear,
So let's have ourselves a little poem.
Until the will to speak loses urgency.
Our animal indecency in print is so blase.
It's about the bell tower, at the golden hour.
Angel of the spires climbs here,
Steel cage, staircase spine, angle of desire.
Ascend the wrought iron, one by one, wrung by wrung.
Is it the rising roof line that makes me feel so swallowed whole,
Or the way my body barely pricks the sky?
The same as a century's worth of virgin's blood
That's passed through my longing veins,
Scheming to convince my aching mind
That pleasure's got nothing on the miracle of need.
Nothing's so purile as meter and rhyme,
When you can't see the ground from that ledge.
And this perch is so far, far from the nest,
Gravity doesn't grant me the privilege of failure,
My bough never breaks, I don't stumble into anything.
So I climb and I carve my initials in the bark
With that feather I found, but it's all so contrived.
And my genes didn't bless me with the foresight of a sage,
But I know how this will end, in apologies and ink on the page.
A slowly constructed crow quilled confession of my spirit to all of you,
Black waterproof ink scars the board, so hot-pressed, pristine and pure.
A slowly constructed manifestation of "to tremble",
As base as a bridge in a song and less like the poem that I promised you.
Nothing's so lurid as haiku-detat on sidewalks in white outlined chalk.
All I've got is this ink, smeared lines.
With our voices in harmony,
The offering of a crow quilled threnody.