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Description
I may carry my voice
on white-crested wingtips
but I refuse to take the names of birds.
My throat is not a desert
with smoldered star limbs
in place of sand, not a stone
for you to overturn and mark
with gentle cloud prints
or leave in the mud
to be perforated by bright moss.

My song is not made
to be thundered like a body
on the wind, to be bellowed
by the jagged mouths
of some distant, forgotten jungle.
It is made to slide along the edges
of twenty burning suns and rise
like a halo of newfound breath
from the crevice which splits
earth and sea. To break open
like the young, wet-winged dove
born of a glorious mud
which cracks mountains with its beak.

My song is this:
your mouth pressed against my heart
and my heart unfurling like a fist,
like a tree which tries to speak
but finds itself without a tongue. It is
a sky for you to stand in. A cold, unknown
world which opens its mouth in peals of
thunder and cries teach me,
teach me how to sing
as if I were some heavy-handed god
and you my unseeing prophet.