Fallen
I arrange on the firing line,
under a pale red sky,
purple flora and fauna
where a robin has died
and fallen from the air.
Feathers stir the meat into china white bone
dragged down in the ground dirt below
where the worms soil themselves without shame.
It is here the seed of suffering
suffuses into another putrid embryo.
Generations of spontaneity, glorious and glad,
bind their tidings to your scalpel bright hand.
It is all so mundane in its obscenity.
My doctor told me, to stop the pain,
I needed to avoid everything.
No caffeine, no conversation,
no keyboard or copulation.
Music would be alright
as long as it was unenjoyable and bland.
I am sick of feeling well.
I am sick of falling like robins from the sky
and never landing.
I am tired of sweating scripture in a tiny newsprint font,
an affront to reason
and what reason leaves behind.
I am sick of the broken bone and its meandering mending
around the great waist of time.
I consult the clock on its threadbare band.
Behind the vexing crystal
little roman numerals smirk sarcastically
then swarm–
I spend the next afternoon
tying ribbons around telephone poles
in the robin's memory.
The ribbons cast shadows runny and dry.
My tears fall into the sky
to drown in pools of arid rain.
Flame bright this fixation, beyond my skill to repair,
bends my mind towards breaking
like the speckled skin of a mother robin's protective egg.
Nowhere to go that doesn't end in leaving.
Nothing to do but wait for the waiting to begin.
Nothing to be, but crowded alone
into the waiting room of heaven,
cracked like a shell,
like the mighty robin's skull,
counted on Jesus's baby soft hand.
A sea of salt wounds spreads in cyanotic waves
transmitted when lepers kiss
in a paragraph on a torn page
holy and hollow as prayer.
Deformed bastard in bricks confined
the orphanage was fine enough
for the monster called the self-made man.
The truth of it is
all meteorologists lie
and you are ill advised
to leave home without an umbrella of bronze
to blind the sun with its own reflection.
Laughing to the point of tears,
I was joking, but sincere
when I said
the halo you wear
chaffs me
like a crown of thorns.
