Do not ask me who I am
Ask me why I am
For that will give me peace
An affirmation of my existence
Amongst the many others God created
A lamb to the slaughter?
who understands the sacrifice she is going to be  put up for and makes peace with it
A clown in a Circus?
One who's duality knows no bounds
A looming shadow?
One with a beating heart
A crow amongst the doves?
Shrewd and menacing
A grasshopper in an ants colony?
Who understands life best in the depth of it's ruins

Creatures of
The night
Speaking only in
The language of
Wings in flight
Raucous caws and calls
Such stark delights
Their bird brains
A substance
To behold
They play and
They learn as
Ancient tales often told
They are symbols
Of fate and omens,
And "What's to be"
Guiding us along
Paths unknown
And simply unseen

Edgar Allan Poe
Never wrote a poem about a crow,
But he did write a poem about a misbehavin'
Raven.

Hark!
The **** crows
For it shows us that it be thy morning
Hark!
The **** shows us...
Rows of dead soldiers because it’s World War I
Hark!
The **** knows
More than he is telling us…
Hark!
The **** crows no more
All the children are dead

The crow: greedily

she comes close, flying away --


at could be danger.

i know
the raven quoth
"nevermore"
and croaked
himself horse
for Lady Macbeth
while the crow
is an omen
of doom
or a messenger
carrying secrets
for the gods
but
if i saw
one of these
blackened birds
in solitude
i doubt
i could tell
which it was

I grew up along a gravel road
in a refitted freight house once owned by a slate mining outfit
my backyard was a rolling sprawl of giant scrap-heaps made
of spent
or unusable slate
some slabs were as big as a tool shed;
mossy promontories jabbing and jutting like dull honey- badger quills
poking out of the hills
as they sprawled in their
heaps and their heaves
and their gullies.
it was a regular shangri la for a couple young boys born in the early to mid 80s
our own private wilderness;
adolescent paradise.
sometimes I would look up from my backyard to
the tops of those slate hills and
I would see my friend Joe.
he  was older than i was and I looked up to him and
I craned my neck
looking up to him then
standing at the summit of a slate hill,
hands on his hips
perched and
hiding behind his silhouette-
the Northampton County Sun setting on behind him
blood orange scarlet and
purple gray blue were the colors of those feelings back then.
time ticked on
the way time does.
my parents got a divorce and I moved across town
there were no slate hills in that backyard
and the slate company chain linked all the hills that remained
and so there stood
a fence between me
and the wonderland I once knew.
Joe died unexpectedly some years later in  
some obscure forest of
one of the Virginias
together we nurtured some regrets suspended in between our
childhood and those
terminal woods.
together we held some memories like beads strung along a strand of silk
translucent pearls like drops of dew
condensing
out there somewhere on the
eternal web of the akasha
unknown to even Indra
unknown to all but us.
couldn’t hold on any longer
had to let it go.  

my brother gave me a pencil cactus
it seemed to flourish in my care
I had been neglecting my own needs for years
not sure I knew what my needs even were
but that cactus needed water and light
and this much i knew
and this much i provided.
it turned a red color down near the bottom of the stalk -
looked it up on google;
some kind of pencil cactus rite of passage.
after the reddening
it becomes then the stick of fire.
we were kicking up dust
over all the trails
fading on behind us
we acted like it was eyes forward only…
towns I used to know, sinking without blinking
absorbed in the horizon on behind me.
I acted like I couldn’t take my eyes off the rear view.
we pulled up and parked on
another
orange
lane
me and my stick of fire.
we landed in a
townhouse -
plenty of legroom
even had central air.
I put the cactus under a window
on the second story
didn’t think about the air vent on the floor
blowin all that dry air
and my stick of fire
withered and wrinkled up
and it shrank and shriveled
I couldn’t bring it back
and i tried
but i
had to let it go.

a giant scooped me in his hands
he was massive
40 feet tall
the war horns blew in the distance when he walked.
he
cocked back his hand and tossed me
through the air
on over the horizon
i was surfing the high skies
on thermals and the slip
streams of vultures
and peregrine falcons-
all of us then dive bombing
all the skinwalkers
like a 2 dimensional love spiral made of
peaks and valleys
and deep trenches swimming in the waters of the
mystic arts….
I held the sun in my hand for exactly one moment
but i blinked and turned
back into a clanging cymbal
a vessel of divine prophecy
going on babbling in tongues.
now a raptor eats my liver every day at noon.
I heard the sun rising in my hands for only just a moment
it was warm and held me in a present bulb of space
I breathed it in
and held it
before I had to let it go.

the architecture of
the Wyoming Valley downtowns
are like frozen songs
crumbling into puddles in a *** hole.
the steam engines and the breakers
are empty skeletons
and dry leaves.
weasels and other vermin making homes inside of holes
the soul was laid off in the vacancy
conflagrations once able to burn down entire cities
at the top of golden arche, and
now the place smells like the smothered ashes of a
single
dwindling
ember .
I yearn for a smooth good-bye
you go ahead and talk and then i’ll go-
yet i ****** up another one
open throats and
another
wire barb in the
neocortex…
I had high hopes
but I had to let it go.

I had high expectations of an early grave
“here lies such and such”
stiff in the long stillness like a possum caught inside a headlight
what a relief that would of been in the brimstone of my twenties
but the roosters kept on crowing
the morning sun kept rising
shining
death away
the big sleep was a false hope
had to let it go.

By Jordan Gee

The Crow's pitch wings
Glide through darkness
Cutting through fog
Like each feather is a blade
Slicing the air
As if slicing my skin
His eyes red
Infused with the dripping from my veins
He soars above a paint-chipped steeple
Perching on an ebony cross
He observes the soil below him
Gaze landing on a single figure
The Crow keeps in his sight
A bleeding body
Staggering towards the final resting place
Who could it be, on this heavy night
But the troubled soul of a human
Toppling down onto a crumbling grave
A life soon to be taken
To ascend to the moon above behind him
A being
Breathing
Breathing
Breathless