While searching for unladen skies,
he came across a magpie resting in
a clear patch of swept dirt at his mangled feet.
(and here the story begins, don’t you think?)
Wait—
Do I intimidate you?
With my silken sashay of solicited yet lavish and rattled ramifications?
Complicated, complex logic behind words you don’t know—
words like sonder, opia, and undulate,
euphonious, sempiternal, and sisyphean.
You called them ‘fancy words’,
as if they are dressed for a masked ball and
in elegant suits and dresses, or someplace in-between,
they are dancing the waltz across marble mezzanines behind grey crenellations.
I’m not asking for the meaning of life or great quintessential and quaint questions,
but yet you ponder what’s after death before looking upon my countenance.
Do I require an irascible attitude in ninth grade, forced to be seen,
a scathing cascade of inward curses, each more extensive than the last?
(*******, *******, *******, and a variety of words meaning **** and ******)
So ashamed to fail, as though I belong to a singular meaning and no other.
I tell you now, I am not
crisscrossed with sultry language and full of your ‘can’t’ attitudes.
Whether I make you work or lie in agony over a line,
the job is to provide not pain, but—
understanding, comfort, hiraeth, empathy,
a place for anger, loneliness, emptiness
and inexpressible language…
but as words are only one facet to this endless complication,
I think you should pay attention to the small things.
But I won't dictate your life,
I’m only a broken magpie confined to earth,
Clothed in feathers and ultimatums.