just the beginning,
slithers off wet lips
like it’s charming.
“Mmmmm.”
Mockingbirds and Mallards
sing of my
slick footprints.
I step in.
I step out.
He stepped out.
We spread together as far as Summer would take us.
We flew down south in high, asthmatic screams;
nocturnal – fugitive.
At first blush they call,
crested blue,
aggressive,
at least to human ears.
His after tastes like a razor blade,
but I am a glutton
and so they
chirp, chirp, chirp.
winds sail slow
arriving with difficulty
to confession
I speak against another
back turned
burned by sun light
I am familiar
with the dark –
with poison
with automatic disappointment
that my lips may
part for lava
but not for pardon
and I sail slow over
raging seas
arriving with difficulty
to confession
where familiar darkness
speaks mostly
about me
It harms me so loud and still,
the sweet departure of
a man and
the worms rolling about.
My window grants lengthy
gossip,
a red haired indiscretion
on his lips,
his soft offering
on a great night,
in a devil’s way.
He drinks like manslaughter,
his pleasant flee to the clouds;
to the moon burning out
his own execution.
We range from youth to wisdom,
he and I,
my blessing is here,
splintered between floor boards.
He is on his way out.
The worms vomit tar around
my window sill,
we slip together in service, but
he keeps a foot on the back door.
Sleep has a price that
I pretend not to notice,
close my eyes,
and should he have loved me,
I’d pity his silence and
let the worms have him.
In three instances, a quarrel. They just happened.
You can imagine, living with an audience for
several years, one might crave affection from the graveyard.
Adorned with diamond rattler’s around her neck,
she hissed! A victim losing her fingernails, clawing concrete,
speaking at a bouquet of guns against her head.
She hissed and spit whore
venom on the Church, on God’s appointments
on the blood of her own Mother.
There was plenty of talk in her head,
like she hadn’t been cooked all the way.
Little Birdie,
we called her.
It.
Whoever she was!
And this, the first quarrel!
The most vicious influence was the lonely lie.
Her handsome face, her warm fingerprints
marking the dry surface of men, her pretty
negligent smile. A suspicious flattery.
We hate that word ‘lonely’. It sounds too much like
her long, cimmerian hair falling out of
nonsense, into the hands of Marcus,
who was legal and wise.
She was sick with her voices,
but her art flowed with age, though an age she would
never meet. She was never a companion,
never a graceful daisy soaking in a glass on the windowsill.
She was sour. The yellow tart.
She was built by a man of taste,
not by a woman of fertile soil and thick roots.
She was the feel of scandal for fifteen years,
a southern discovery of poor breeding;
thus, of the quarrel! The second!
Until we found her. Marked on
a cotton morning, her delicate apology.
Her body rot little overnight, her palm held smudges of
the colour of kisses she blew everywhere.
The undeserving. The unpolished drunkards
sleeping in her
empty stairwell.
Most people like that war.
The soldier falling on
desperate knees, giving her awful consent,
her soiled white handkerchief surrendering from
the cup of her bra.
This is the third quarrel. The one they want to hear.
Was there a symphony of blood?
Was she wrapped in her velvet curtain and dropped
from the top floor?
Who played the piano? Who picked up her body
and decided that she wrote this score?
Even the tears cried for her gossiped about this act.
This was the starving quarrel.
Fed like a good husband, yet hollowing still!
Maybe she was a little wild
and sick with threats,
poor Little Birdie, her nervous
beauty gulped her down like a glass of Brandy.
She was tired.
And this, the third quarrel. Act Three.
Curtains down.
maggiemaeijustsaythis 