She Spent a Year Hallucinating Birds
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They perched on roofs and fences and sills. They posed statue-still on catenary lines. They aligned along cables like prayer beads on rope. They amassed en masse on the cemetery lawn and marauded the broad, yawning fields like cattle. Their cackles were black. Each shadow dove and pecked. They nested in chimneys and chirped at the chime of the church bell. They worked in shifts. Clocked out at odd hours. They laid their eggs in the Vs of trees. They teemed on the dry-baked banks of creek beds, streams the sun had overseen. They teetered on the bed-knob tops of flagpoles. They pitched like pennies into founts. They pitched like babies into wells. They thumped at doors then skulked away like hoodlum teens. They jabbed her. When she cried they did it faster. Everyone knows what happened next. Some grew big as sunflower stalks, others tall like bonfire flames. Or moving vans. Or the sick, brick houses people die inside of every night. Their hatchlings canopied the sky. Was it her fault, then, when they pinned her to the ground and thrust their feathers down her throat? Or wormed between her legs in bad-man ways? Or rattled plumes and whooped and beat her body with their wings? Or locked their talons to her thighs and tra-la-la-ed that ditty from the old-time music box? Or forced their whiskies past her lips? Or put her in the pillory? This was foreplay, in a way. They rolled in rabid packs and woofed like dogs. She couldn’t throw a bone. The meat was gone. They chased her and they named her and they boiled her tears and bathed her. Then they ate her.
The wicked ways of the mind. In the story of the Two Wolves...she was letting the bad wolf win, and win, and win, and it eventually destroyed her. She kept feeding the fascination of the birds until they got too powerful and overtook everything. Some things in our minds can feel so simple until they aren't. Some habits so small until we suffer from addiction. Pay attention to what goes in and what circulates within...before we get eaten...alive..
ReplyDelete50 shades of something... the word choices are extremely greasy.
ReplyDeleteI was wondering if the she is hallucinating.
Sounds like an orgy? IS the she some sexual goddess? Did they eat her out???
This poem is something else. The more I read it, the dirtier it gets. Pretty much everything about this poem is a gang bang approaching a gang rape. But the tone seems too silly to be interpreted as sinister.
ReplyDeleteI take it back. It's rape. She cried. Brick houses people die inside. Rabid. Forced. Super rape talk. I feel bad having overlooked it because I thought it was too ridiculous
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