A gross circumstance
in a dawn made for
temperatures other than
the hot blistered numbness
in, on the skin above my brow.
A pain feathered here
through my limbs
and ever present.
Adulthood plays with and
manipulates my soul,
a fever tempered by nothing.
The cold coffee in the sink
is not for me. I can’t drink
the disease away.
Birds on my ledge that mock me
Pressing a feeling of never enough
into my skull. Their songs are a feather.
Feather.
And I clasp my hands,
Pulling and picking at each finger
I believe if I pull enough,
they will do something,
create anything. They stand cramped
and unforgiving, unwilling to
uncurl, discovering nothing.
Worthless fever. Feather.
I hear a pulse from my normal life,
the sound of clothes in another room
worn to the bone,
tumbling like a fever feather
over the railroads
that plague this place
and the sadness of repression hovers.
They sing, these feather-covered
fevers – joyful, pleading with the sun.
The wood at my elbows are divets,
permanent places of reflection, terror.
Two doors stand closed,
Resembling what I feel
in the back of my neck.
Tension, the rising of unknowns.
The chipped linoleum whines
it’s protests and I shuffle.
To the edge of the place
where the uncurling and unfurling
happens, wrinkled and frothed,
gleaming white and puffed up like a dove,
cleaning evidence of sustenance
with no strength left.
The hole there reeks.
Leaning over, I feel the tunnel
I escape in close itself off.
I’m resolved, thinking
and swaying unsteady,
something beyond my sight
disappears down the drain,
flowing out - to the river,
beyond.
The beyond is better
than where I am,
in a space six hundred feet
wide, in a place where
feathers winged stand outside
with their freedom.
The railroads and the river
meet in a parallel line.
A guide to the city and a map
to my fever. Feathers flock
over, and come to my ledge.
areudirty
jbbartram-illu
kianamaiart
snowghoul
yousharknotpass
blakekathryn
