The brown-skinned, big-eyed bird
perches next to me while I cry.
He looks at me, I at him, and then our eyes
Shift toward the glowing--blinding--Sun,
Radiating Life, in every essence of the word:
Warmth, Light, Love, Vitamin D...

I remember all my old friends, I remember D.
I don’t think about her anymore, like how a bird
doesn’t think before he leaves the tree. One word
I think of now: Free. Oh, here I go again, I say as I cry,
not sure if my tears are born from the gaze of the blazing Sun,
or from my voracious mind, that Inner Eye...

From every crack and crevice flames an eye
Watching me; but all I can think about is this letter “D,”
with its round stomach, rounder (but not fuller) than the Sun.
I empathize with Icarus. I pray that in My Next Life I’ll be a bird,
so away, AWAY! I can fly, and never have to hear my cries--
Never have to speak (only sing!) or mutter a word.

But that is all that rounds my mind, w o r d s .
So I close my sticky, death-filled eyes,
Hoping I halt the flow. But, in my darkness, I hear another cry:
One of anguish, one of woe--a Scream. I imagine if I OD’d
I’d finally be Free, as a bird,
and in my dying I’d finally come face to face with the Sun.

No waxen wings to melt by the Sun,
No letters numbers phrases words--
But also, no sounds, no sights, of chirping birds,
But also, no lips to taste, nothing to see without eyes,
and I’d forget all about my old friends, my old friend, D...
Would the tears really stop then? Or would the cries

Of loved ones survive? My Cry
reaches out from my blackness, burns in the Sun’s
Ever-flowing, Ever-pulsating Light, which has been there for D
years, uncontained by human words,
the Universe’s Golden Grounding Eye--
Is this the Song of Songbirds?

Hush, I hear the wind cry, as my eyes,
wanting to ebb and flow, flood with the Sun’s life-giving force.
I think of D. I hear the untranslatable songs of birds.
I feel I’ve died alive.

Brinn W.