WHAT SONG
had me a reverie there was a continuum from divinity to Malbolge, a kind of slumming passage, lined with code— some elegant as a currawong song, some raw as a grackle’s dissonance. what delicious departures, the passing from one to the next. what songs those black birds sing.
* * *
stony the bitter road we trod to the chast’ning—
the rod rise high as the song of the steady slaughtered
the weary & silent
let our blood,
let our blood.
lift ev’ry sigh ev’ry sky watered with tears.
let our blood.
let our blood.
the path stray from our feet,
cast us to gloomy places where we met the chast’ning:
the shadowed world
of the rolling sea.
let our blood.
let our blood.
the world drunk with the wine of it—
* * *
I don't feel like singing no more no more.
how in the heck they gon find my neck if I don’t sing no more?
how in the heck I don’t feel like singing
no more no more. say what left could my breath be for, be for
if I ain’t fixt to sing no more?
I was a bird of a sort of a bird. yes we was. a bird like a clock, we was full of cog. the cogs were in us where we hadn’t them before, & I—our own fingers hadn’t cogged us inside up, though. I was not in a cage for a cage takes you out of the world. yes yes it does. what it does by way of, in the way a cage comes between birds & the world. & the world was on me like feathers. pinions pinned into me being sort of a bird though not in a cage we weren’t. the cogs weren’t ours neither & I don’t feel like singing no more.
“then dance” the clock makers said, winding &
minding us to wind, & we wound
lest our feet—
lest our feet—
stray. but
when I don’t feel like winding now—
though/so the dissonance strikes like a clock chiming time
like clockwork the cogged heart wound to cry out its hung wooden house—
but I don’t feel like telling you what time it is now.
