Delete the Bird
My will was just a constant cuckoo
by the hour I arrived, not mine
but calling me the epitome of waste.
He warned me toward him
by an inch of dangling wire
that charged each minute into noise.
I longed for him, not mine. I forced him
with my vision to sing on,
wishing he’d linger like a danger scent
so I’d know he was a danger.
Others would say: “we’ll pray”
“we keep you in our thoughts”
as they gnawed turkey legs
in plain view of my ravishing, not mine.
I pulled my eyelids off and coveted
this not mine bird.
Folding my arms behind me, I faked
withholding so he might nibble
lifelines from my palms
bitter as he was to circumvent
my body for my mind, to acknowledge
I was body first.
I let this brief olympics go till morning,
called him Mine teasingly
and made him think I didn’t want him gone.
But want in wasted times is not the want of life—
it fights the ground and sucks
at every thought a godly laxative.
Did I want his dungeon-yellow
to devise a new direction for my life?
A death not mine but
close enough to hear it as my own
and far enough to hate its mercy, too.
