100 Assignment

I took it in a different direction.

Swan Song

{To Kensington}

To the popsicles:
I’m calling it quits.
My ice drips limp
in the Serpentine –
exhaust – smother.

{nothing left but the ruling}

An eyrar of cygnets take turns biting
and cutting a crying child’s fingers.
Their beaks drip blood. Mute, orange
bills shine in the night. They’re owned
by the Queen, their feathers to God’s ears.
Ultraviolet, they hunt through the muggy
night, ghost wings haunting the ring roads,
masks peering from rotary brush. A whiteness
stealing over the grass to you. Shake, man –
they come to rend you in the dark.

{burn me once}

rage for forgetting, rage at the blankness the despair
of forgetting, the tortuous loop. lasso me to your moon,
see how you neglect to leave me hogtied. pitch a bucket
of pitch, I’ll baseball my eyes and snake the grass under
foot, chant a song of self-devouring. here’s the thing: I’m
sick to death of you and everything you are, the tower
of heuristics crashing down at the word “resonant
frequency,” but still I come back like a sick dog
and choke on chow. I will tattoo swan necks on
my forearms, detail feathers in rhinestone surface
studs in the thousands, and still you won’t catch my
glare. rage turns to wrath to despond in the time
it takes you to click a thumb, but still my fingers
knead skin into a pleasing pattern, more monstrous
with each press, blissfully less me with each contortion.
you neglect even the courtesy of entrapment. you neglect
acknowledging this fat bird, simpering hard for your
spite. make the world in a worse image, let me rise,
dying, from each boiled inch of pond steam, denied.

{comfit}

This napkin goes in your collar,
that’s how you keep the mess
off your clothes. It’s OK.

You don’t have to shop at JC Penny’s.
You don’t have to look at your school
pictures. You don’t have to worry.

Don’t buy candy for everyone you know
once a week. They don’t eat it, and they’ll
still have parties without you.

Sometimes the black swan never grows
beautiful. Sometimes the ugly duckling
gets eaten in the reeds.

The collar doesn't need to be starched
unless you want it to. Sometimes
you will build an angel in the wilderness

and it will stay there, and no one will
be saved, and that’s OK. It’s OK. Cry.
That, at least, is deserved.