True love is:
                  A waxwing bird feeding
                  A cuckoo who was left in her nest
                  The starving cuckoo is pleading
                  The waxwing is doing her best.

I am a waxwing
feathered in snow
fat on juniper
with a wingspan 6 months long in either direction.
I sing the hollow bone electric
above the din of coyote
wolf pack on the hunt
... winter's whispers to bare branches.
there's no sun to sing to.
there never has been.
I will take flight, I will find it
6 months long
in either direction.

Winged migration
to flee from migraine
irritations:

I was the shadow
of the waxwing slain,
flung and flew through
wire flues on the roofs

To be some happier
glove, not on hand

tail tip, bright yellow
can survive eight years in wild
cedar waxwing bird

The poster read:

“Gone Missing”

The come-back-kid
has failed to show.
The Old Man saw him,
******* by the Rainbow Factory
wall, against the wind,
like a prayer no longer given
to the prism-surfing life.

He said,

“The come-back-kid, might
Not come back”..

He wrung his
swindled heathen, left
with haversack and Macintosh,
hummed ballad in a Sea-King crown,
the colloquy of shepherd lore.
head far too full to sing,

Caught riding
in a burnt out car of
rude December archetypes,
an engine feathered Westerling,
to think.

He went
to where they bury boats,

Where mud larks perk
for potsherd farthings,
red-shanked in the gallon slob
oblivious...

Far off the Ness
He’ll watch them go..

... on meteoric dawn patrols,
a contrast to his built-in
obsolescence.

In provinces
of platitude
He’ll form no evanescent tie,
invoke his tattooed waxwing
back against their lactic
saccharine, to beg
the notion die...

But leavened light may carry,

A bold ceramic dialect
that skitters off
the short-sun marsh

dissipates in linnet banter
winnowed from the winter barley
crossing out the county lines..


The come-back-kid
will not return,
a blue-eyed, fell, Promethean.

Disfigured by the absolute
He’ll beat his way
unrecognised.

about the shivers
running down your spine.
Shivers won’t run
when talk is going on.
When you touch the holy stone
or read the words of the sacred book,
touch and look, but never talk.
Minds don’t shine
when songs are being sung.
The yew that stands in the ancient wood
lets seed cones fall within
circles of thrush and waxwing calls.
Trees never grow without the sun,
whatever was being thought
while the seeds were sown.