Here I am, prancing, faintly smirking, on this tenuous branch

Calmly I sit, cutting an ascetic, fashionable figure

The sky threatening to lock-on like a hammock of fear

High up where the sky’s shades absorb into my blackness

Inviolable, removed from the island of men, free from the tangle

Of laughter, hoots, whistles, arguments and sobs

Ceaselessly cavorting into the blanket of my wind

I am a chameleon, a ghost, a stoolie, a thief, an extra in a film

A shiver passes over my feathers,

A serrating light rides the black moon’s glow

Then, a yellow glare, a dissolve of smoke, a corridor of sound

From the cumulus floor a haggard and grizzled blaze of steel

My life is no longer safe up here

I’m an old lag, myopic, yearning to squabble and dash

I fasten my jaded attention and go slack

This is no road-kill remotely beckoning

I peer diagonally into the calculus of my senses

Calculating my accumulations from an unfeasible past

Trying to make sense of this ear-splitting engine of echoes

Bursting on tracks carved in clouds, foisting alarm, puncturing time

This scene inflames a secret nerve paralyzing my wings

I want to fly into a window

I’ve been caught in an interior and it’s left me wanting

So I wait and unwind my grip on on the cloud’s apron

Volunteering to stay, I feel the fascicles of my wings wonder

My anxious beady eyes flickering in the exhaust

And coal-fire of my own private spectacle

Caught in the grimy shadows of my misdeeds

I realize the blocks of steel are lightening

Scarring the night sky with the frosted steam of a new optimism