(not that great, but the natural thing that comes from my style nowadays)
I
Just like the swifts, who bargained with Darwin's Evolution and lost
legs for wings, you seem certain freedom will compensate loss
much the way you’d toss nickels in wells for happiness,
when pennies would suffice for the same in a gambler’s machine.
You say it’s the quaint sort of altruism the deities are entertained to see, and freedom is throwing life to luck.
I say you’re stupid.
Just like that, I think you are a swift
uncurling from the shards of rules you broke, ramming your head straight through them.
You may be bleeding glass splinters, but your smile seeps with green and teal
mantras of surety like "we will live gladder"
and "this is for the greater good"
which is ironic, because the latter is the motto of every villain who's ever lived.
You’d like to be a leaf in a book, but I do not know you're the sort to keep within binders without ripping them
clean. You'd burst the margins like rivers break banks and topple trees
leaving the adventuring swifts nowhere to roost.
Every year at thousand-mile flyways, we watch myriad birds break into apple song—
Not the sweet red kind, but unripe and emerald.
They see not lighthouses and garages on the coast, nor the crows’ telegraph poles
only pray new caves will spring out of the sand in time
to house them from crackling cape towns halfway down longitudes
when the world tilts nether ways, and it turns cold up here
and blazing hell down there.
If swifts knew astrology they’d realise their stars are good at least once a year.
But we know they cannot cease flying, and must die in flight too
because the better parts of their legs lie trophies in Charles Darwin’s cabinet, now,
and they make lemming brothers jealous when they fly straight into the sun.
II
I am not that.
I like to think of you as my frosted window, my tarot deck
Through which I may see but not see clear.
I like the kingdom.
The crown may strangle us all, and maybe to you I am only a puppet of someone else.
You’d like to make me your puppet, but that seems no better to me,
only an exchange of some dreary safety for some exhilarating peril.
Rather die slowly inside the rusting crown
than plunge straight through windows the way you do.
—
Note: Flyways are migration routes. Swifts have had their legs so diminished by evolution—in a trade-off between aerial agility and mobility on the ground—that they are no longer able to walk or hop as normal birds do.
