Where Birds Sleep
It goes down and the birds go to sleep.
Where they sleep I don’t know.
When I left my life I lied to my mother
about where I was sleeping. Dropped
out. Shacked up. Smoked dope. Took
to the streets. One of my friends was
AWOL from Fort whatever it was.
My mother sent a letter to the fake
address I’d given her to tell me
I’d given her shingles.
That she was done with me.
That I’d broken her heart.
How many of those do you get
in a lifetime? That letter. That heart-
break. That rash. And then it was
done. The trouble between us mostly
over. It’s true for many parents.
Not always getting what they’d
been hoping for. Day is done, and
the next day it’s back again. If the
letter is delivered to a house you
never set foot in, does it mean
that whatever it was didn’t pertain
to you no matter how much
you meant it? Is there a house
somewhere where those letters
accumulate? A dead-letter-mother-
daughter house or whatever it was
you couldn’t make right no
matter how hard you turned it.
