Sweet passerinesparrow i see your brown feathers
in the headlights, the moon
the way you commune like wrapped suns warped around
old ponds, old lands, old avenues

you dance on the rivers in the opalescence
of your lonely calling, all the many nights
upon sudden storms like skulls inside
a dead soldier's helmet,

waiting for something to come to you, or just bring you crumbs
the stuff of Christ like heather flowers
frozen in atoms and ions, as a heathen heaven
you swirl your little bird wings
dressed as if ready for something new

a testament of grin to grimness, godly or goodly
as the filthy haze around a city's night
worn in a faded blue raincoat, all
it's stubborn day when the umbrellas fight back the rains
under the burnt-umber sky
as if they were accusations,

prison or vengeance, these roots in nerves and blood
as steel, as bullets, as women who cry in orgasm;
convictions of creations, nothing

you learn, can be forgiving; not even the crimes of holy thieves,
more so the unholy who break bread see the paths
visibly black, as prayers, while
 the heart hums...

thrumming, thumping, thundering
you find yourself thirsty in a winter’s park fountain
along infinity, and nothing, feeling the wind in the ice
as those metal bird-like planes
fly over head, dropping things that whistle...

you watch as the cement & steel buildings of the city you knew
crumble-
dust from dirt and blood and sex and horror and
soft warm volcano energy, what could be worse
you wonder-

and the crows and ravens and jackdaws and rooks, those terrible
Corvus black birds that often hunt your kind, spin in twisters
in hurricanes, typhoon type winds
like carousels spinning out of control
tornadoes, and torrential rains, and a thousand black umbrellas
flitter, fluttering from the people-hands
as they scream and cry,

you do not understand, but you feel the fear, worse than any hunt
that has ever chased down after you, and your little bird heart
thrums
as windows explode and taxi cab cars crash into walls
like a wild flock of starlings
gone mad,

a concrete reservoir cloudburst swells
around your small winged body
and you tossed through the wet air, spiraling end over end
as close to a human thought, you wonder, "is this it?"
and the sky turns a strange kind of blood-blue, resounding
with words like shotguns and wolves wild,

a few children lay scattered in the cracked streets;
you recall them playing ball
and tossing you breadcrumbs
how you wish you could take them all far away;
if only you were a great Falconiformes,
a great bird of prey
a kind of giant eagle or magnificent vulture,
how you could fly them to their

empyrean

but you are no more than the frightened hare
in the eye of a Bubo scandiacus
deliberately numb, comfortably sick
with fear of earthquake and admiration
oddly, the children sing and they dance around the spinning wheel
in the burnt park

like living liquids, singing, "ashes, ashes, we all fall down"
you heard that song a thousand years before
and now you hear it again, this extant greatness of youth
in the midst of miserable Hell, only you really do not understand

Hell

it is just a word you've often heard; you think it a place of darkness;
the collapsing wall of the city around you like crumbling mountains
the whizz and scream of fighter planes speed by overhead,
as you sit
on the broken limb

of an old oak tree; this land is become a poltergeist
brown and grey as gravestones, green with littered bags of garbage
yet amidst the rubbish heap there is laughter
grasping Einstein's Relativity by it's nature and Darwin's
transmutation of species, clockwork things in tinted-orange

you poor bird, thunder bolted and blanched against the very degree of your sympathy
a solitary creature as alone as Orpheus in the dark Hades, even with your song,
and you whistle: "Pa rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum,

rum pum pum pum," you have no gift fit for a King,
but you've built your nest
fit for a little birdie Queen, "rum pum pum pum,"
and you sing...

and the death-chill of ashes fall, indiscriminate
in valves of laughter and the smell of lilacs,
lavender from the dying flowers
you watch from your winged branch
as many cats run across the park
and away across the littered streets,

like so many rats you've seen
come up from the sewers on a bad day,
and this is a bad day, yes ...this is a bad day

tattered guns break sockets into the fabric of the atmosphere
even while the children, nothing left now, sing and play
it tears you inside as you watch them fall in a spray of flesh and bone and blood
as the gas-masked soldiers in red march through this New Hell

the agony, and then a feeling that must be despair
as hearts and guts fall prey to bullets and gravity in horrible speeds
the children's mouths smashed, you wonder if you were ever born

but you are just a little bird, sitting on a branch in a park in the middle of this bloodied war
scorched in wet ashes, nothing you can do
but shake among the blurred voice and look to the stars

the stars wait

pulsing conflagrations and the soldiers are gone, like a wild break in the ocean waves
there is so much burning, smoking, burning...
and you watch as a squirrel runs out from nowhere, from through a black cloud
followed by yellow and tongues and silhouettes

BANG! Sssss....

then lashing talons dragging at you, but only for a moment, as they shake let go then fall away
your pounding heart reborn, featureless in the dewdrops
and the flames, this delicate moment like daggers in the side
if you were human you'd say something from Shakespeare,
but instead, "O leaves," nevertheless
as the silence reigns-

and then there are the black tanks, like a palace of fearsome skulls
growing and growing so terribly
so much for a little bird to see; then all these birthing shadows,
empty shoes,
loose stones,
the silence...

anundertoneofoldReggaemusicbegi nsandfadesintothedarkeningday-



*"Dont worry about a thing,
cause every little thing gonna be all rightDont worry about a thing,
cause every little thing gonna be all right."

`end.



*Above song lyrics from Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds."


"In the hallucination of the horror
He saw this shoe, with no sole, rain-sodden,

Lying on a moor.

And there was this garbage can, bottom rusted away,
A playing place for the wind, in a waste of puddles."
~Ted Hughes, Crow's First Lesson.

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