For the sights and sounds lost,

for the love made that never lasted.

For the long lost songbird

who still plucks my nerves

from a bloody distance.

By living I come into death,

through no other entrance.

And she waits for me there,

with olives and the quills

of cloaked bones,

with eggshell eyelids.

She waits with a slit

in her metallic backbrain,

still feeding on what the milk

of my cells has offered.

And I go to her with

paint in my joints, with glue

and its contestant acid

wrapped around my blue

fingernails, in a shawl

of feathery worms,

calling her with the name

that my mouth has become,

a smoking pillar of salted wounds.