A Bird Is A Desperate Poem by G.C. Waldrep

I don't believe in your pious Emersonian ecstasies, your wind-clocks & wing
bursaries. Autumn cast a wheel in the foundry summer built but then summer
skipped, bankrupt & disguised in women's clothing. You leave a box of tools by
the roadside and it makes fun of the highway, not the workmen, is one theory:
travel as scapegoat, anti-Thoreau, an idea of blamable motion. I like it! says the
Magic 8-Ball, rolling out from under the chest of drawers in which you've stored
the color-coded impedimenta of childhood. Without the figment of self-reliance
we live bonestruck in this rickety deluge of frogs & wheat, only larger & without
a certain diaphanous panache. This is one of those New England mornings that
feels like the fracture that was the original language, & also all subsequent
fractures. My mother was the ice age that sheeted these hills: I'd ask, "May I?"
& with each silence advance a step or two toward my inheritance. The riddle of
ligature plays itself out against the laps of all the small towns, which of course
you can see from the highway, if you close your eyes. Art is neither the
expressive underglamour of things nor a weight you lift. Yes, you can still walk
there, & no, parallel parking is not an approved fiduciary reinvestment strategy.
Carve this into the neck of fire: the very idea of elected officials, dream planets
spinning away at light speed from each others' tribal mitigations, the leather floor
(or ceiling) where you've tattooed your gold-plated spirit level, your orgasmic
contempt.