When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free
In the silken sail of infancy,
The tide of time flow'd back with me,
The forward-flowing tide of time;
And many a sheeny summer-morn,
Adown the Tigris I was borne,
By Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold,
High-walled gardens green and old;
True Mussulman was I and sworn,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.

The redbreast kills
and kills itself against
the window

Sooner or later the blood in the breast will break the window into hundreds of pieces you can swallow whole

Keep swallowing

The redbreast
loves you and wants you
to remember the love

So it makes you puke into the toilet blind

I was blinded by love

And drowned
in an empty bathtub
spitting up birdshit

Covered in red feathers

In the day’ s mirror
you see a tall black man.
Fingers of gold cattail
tremble, then you witness
the rope dangling from
a limb of white oak.
It’ s come to this.
You yell his direction,
the wind taking
your voice away.
You holler his mama’ s name
& he glances up at the red sky.
You can almost
touch what he’ s thinking,

You have installed a voice that can soothe you: agents
of the eaten flesh, every body

a cocoon of change —

Puparium. The garden
a birthing house, sarcophagidae —

And green was so dark in the night-garden, in the garden's
gourd of air —

green's epitome
of green's peace, the beautiful inhuman

leg-music, crickets'
thrum —
a pulse