We were kids, the kind that got wasted by the side of the road
the kind that wore their feathers like stitches on the skin
the mottled brown of what has already lost its whereabouts.
I chose my fathers well in what winters me through
the broken concrete of a town I already left behind.
I always come back to this: the crackle of violence
between my teeth like a bone I can’t quite chew.
We were kids. Hardly old enough to stain our nesting ground
and yet we flew, yearning for something equally wild, finding
our bodies aftermath. As much creation as it is ritual.
You see, there’s a darkness in the heart of St. George
a darkness that knows itself dragon. Something unseen.
The blue scent of the soul, where each form is fact
ready to break in its most fallible parts.
We were kids. We just needed something to touch
like we had touched, raising ourselves as monsters
from our most monolithic sleep, hiding in our own
mouths, a silken string of prayers, something to deliver us.
Because there is always a small death that creeps
between you and me, something mouselike and unassuming
and I haven’t begun to ask what I must ask, father: how come
each new body is as much relief as it is devastation?
