1.
Arthritic hands, laced and limbless, perch the fog.
Blackbird mutters about the hollow men
plagued by syntax. The plagues come in waves.
The wind rattles with shells of brilliance
that cease to live up to mentioning.
Blackbird follows me, shouting loss, failure, loss.
Silence fails like the combative noise of trying.
I'm not a war criminal.
Blackbird mutters, moons are stones, too.
2.
The regression of my voice is nothing new to say,
like the unsupportive dress caught between my legs.
The regret of my tongue is nothing new.
I sleep like a ruin.
3.
The shrapnel—the was, the after,
the me-not-you,
splitting hairs like tattered shoes.
It’s something of an anachronism,
running marathons over cratered faces.
He fell deaf, supine,
gutted ink bottle,
and I taciturn.
See that shadow?
substratum of my legs.
It’s not yours.
I knifed my tongue into a dull chord.
4.
He marked the fall of a slaughter on his arm,
tombstone flesh honoring the stone-gray eyes
like moons the gods didn’t want anymore.
Cross-hatched egg tangled my dress
—a push, and my chest caved.
5.
Sparrow teases the device of forgetting
camel-lashes thick like the fingers that framed my face,
or legs treading indifferent plateaus,
large ribbons of ink veiling empty lines,
a broken pulse of thought, the tongue I’ve lost.
Sparrow laughs, Wer bist du?
Rivulets of veins; her eyes like a moon tangled in trees,
and a sleep jaw.
The innocent thrust from my body,
like lungs deflating.
My birth is weak.
Aber mich, Sparrow,
I am blank.
6.
Buzz clippers resonate louder, deeper than bombs,
and sharper than lonesome brick walls
jutting my knee caps.
My pen broke; it stuttered blot-blobs over thin greens,
continuous exhales under blue-black splatter.
There is just this one thing—
just these few things
I never liked about you, Sparrow.
Luxembourg,
I need a couch, to avoid the raid.
7.
A blood splotch blooms over
incendiary match peeling fiber from porous fiber
in a drum sprayed with graffiti argot.
A neutral void now,
and perhaps I am sitting too close—
tiny toes crack and pop in vacuous silence,
like my voice crumbling from my mouth.
8.
The Blackbird, the Sparrow
sparking steel dragged through the street.
Not the best metal, like fingernails
flaking, chipping. Mine belong to the days
when the sky never caught fire—
this drum never caught—
9.
My lost blood survives in turning graves.
The mountain spindrift and restless frost-blue sighs
neutralizing the ash and cinder smoldering,
the ocher drum of a rusted city.
This is the winter flaking onto our faces in quiet mockery.
We survive as statues abused by the elements:
in the spring we’ll awaken covered in mud
and forget that a part of us had ever died.
10.
He never speaks of sunset—
the hourglass dripping grenadine and lavender,
or the Autumn blooming naked ladies
with blown-back heads,
deep purple lips. He never craves color.
I’m the well dug straight down into the mountain-bowels,
opaque water sun-speckled.
Organic and stagnant,
I’m all gold and black pearls.
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