For Franz Wright
Assassin doves
Confessing
They’ve slept with heiress hawks they didn't love,
Stole grubs from vesper sparrows and smaller birds,
Exhumed darkness for no reason than that that is what they do,
Made music of an ugly world and turned it sad and beautiful.
It's this last one the crows will murder.
Nothing that shits, they'll say, can speak for the light.
The holy is reserved for assholes, only.
No endlessly arcing gesture of yourself can be right
Unless everyone else is wrong,
And who among you, brothers, is wrong?
The thrashers and shrikes twirl spirits on ice,
Converse on the things they hate, hate -
But pain doesn't go around like hors d'oeuvres;
It must be made fresh each time.
The lines of the sacred are always tapped,
And I’m exposed as a cat before a mirror,
Taking inventory,
Ashamed I could not see my own face there,
That I needed the vengeance of God
To feel I exist.
The damage I've done
Thinking love's on the far side of my skin.
