KINGDOMS IN THE WILD

I have a crow inside me and no one can know. I can feel it all the time. It is like the entire night sky and all the stars and every beautiful sound you can imagine. It is like being too excited to sleep. It is like being twelve years old and stripping off my clothes outside in the rain. Savage. Girl. Suddenly awake to the deviance available in every ordinary moment. The possibilities of my current situation had not occurred to me before now. The freedom. There is a crow in my chest.

A joke I was once told goes, I didn’t choose this life, this life chose me. Fuck that. Choose a hell of your own making over the hell that unmakes you. Flower a garden of rage & eat & eat & eat.

“From distance, I swallow the rain down to its slowest blade and still can’t / tell if I am the thinned silver of God’s fallen tongue or its bloody song.”

“Some days, a body grows like a cornflower in wheat fields where crows bend into melted knife-handles. We pass a way and the distance broadcasts its snowy whims in the shape of a tousled bedsheet.”

“How to detour your triggers? The post in post-traumatic stress disorder is unchaperoned, open to shelling at all times. This whole season is a wound-broken animal rubbing its bloodied hooves against the wired fence of a borderline.”

“Differential diagnosis. Meaning your pain labours under a pseudonym. Meaning something is hunting you from within with a wolfpack of newly readied teeth.”

“Like any unloved thing, I don’t know if I’m real when I’m not being touched.”

“magic rising from / a man is prophesy / from / a woman is heresy / maybe he leaves me / a purloin of unsung fires”