I am the black bird of midnight

staring at the streetlights til they crack

I perch on rusty guardrails

at the outskirts of the world and smoke

in a blood dried leather jacket

of many folded wings

watching the windshields gleam

toward a world I never joined

the throngs are passing with their gas

the circuitry of entrapment

with such sexy advertisements

flickering on battered billboards

pour a highway down my throat

I will coat little bits of gravel

with my paint saliva

and cough them up

into the stream that doesn't understand

my flock of ghosts is a host triangle

for a plague of blues

that sometimes covers the wound

and our tongues glisten

in a towering tornado of open beaks

that goes flickering under the stars

and their gut strewn molten followers

I am a flying key whose thread

got caught in the lock

the weight of silver on its way down

is my clothespin crown and ruddy hereafter

roads flow over my brow

even when I dive in the ocean

streams are articulate and rare

even as they multiply like snakes

for my gobbling gash

I fly for the lasso of the moon

over city straw so elegantly reaching

and the ecstasies seeded in country gloom

for my nest of echoes

and a branch that is transparent too.