[W T Clark]

The birds aren't real or only real enough
for clockwork: the cold comportment of the show
that frazzles you at dawn.
You sit up: smirking with sleep,
just like you did every schoolday except
that school is only now the poised baroque
cathedral of shrillnesses demanding
you take notes: there is always time
to learn more melodious screaming(!)

& maybe you that one time joined
your voice to theirs
in your melodious
screaming. That time the boy declared
he loved you & that is why
he would not let you out

of the house as if the bird of you were wound
up wrong & had to be set right,
that maybe there
was a key he needed: to wrench you into love

& that, until then, this
was the cage he'd made for you he needed
(for the bird-of-you in its shit-and-mortar bars)
for the morning's muffled, desperate shambles of a repairing.