Through

How easily we underestimate air

Unobtrusive, modest in its motion

Ever ground, never figure

Have you felt it massage your nervous system

With concert pianist dexterity?

Do you understand its invisible might?

I am fluent in its transparent tongue

Even inert and incarcerated, it has kept me company

Stirring a feather, blessing my beak, counseling stoicism

Teaching me a prayer that consists of four words:

Lift, thrust, drag, weight

Wait

When the seed crowded into my slack-jawed cup

(What perverse imp persuaded you to purchase something made of purple plastic?!?)

I watched your dirty hand with clean contempt

Who collects whose excrement, after all?

Defecating on the news from my perch

I knew I was a sovereign counting hours

Between the peasant present and my monarchal moment

Some tantalizing tomorrow

How gullible my trilling made you

How smug you were, bragging about my morning song

I hated your marmalade gossip and crumby complaints

Your clattering keys, costume of an amateur jailer

The cat thought it was frightening me with its calculated stare

No cat can fly

Watching your phone eat your life

I felt the hour of escape approach

The trickling prologue of an epic torrent

Drowsy, your tongue thick with the encrypted intelligence of dreams

I knew you would forget the latch, eventually

My prima donna preening seemed innocuous

You could not feel the performance wriggling in the egg of rehearsal

I was born for the air, you Brobdingnagian buffoon!

Your fat, shuffling dimensions never impressed me

The jury of your dandruff found you guilty of aging

I knew the earth would hold you fast, shouting below

So much flesh for gravity to palpitate

Pale, globular pamplemousse

Your billowing robe

Too little peel for so much sloppy fruit

You will rot under me

Your wrinkled hand a sweaty visor

Over eyes too slow to count my vanishing feathers, overhead

I know you mistake this grey, dusty box for the world

It is a stupid sarcophagus of smells

How seldom you open the pane, smudged with boredom, yonder

Even when the trout burned and the onions begged for respite

You boiled the life out of your food and taught it to stink

With all that salty bubbling

I will teach a pinkly astonished worm

To play lunch's part, with my first hour

Outside

You will trip into your lonely tomb

Having never eaten anything alive

Here it is, then

Your responsibilities drowned in that last cocktail

Embarrassed in its squat, orange flowered cup

The barred sentinel is dangling like a modifier

"While swimming across the lake, the sun rose"

You will show a Dunhill the sunset any second

Multiplying the openings

Then the sanctified second will sashay onstage

One does not need hands to pray

You have never understood that door

Your muttering impatience is no key

At last, you've heaved it wide

Feline distraction, evoke that habitual admonition

To stay inside, so that I never will be again

Through them both am I, now

Into the gloaming

Missing, remembered

Wings opened like a stranger's mail

Scandalously legible

Covered in the crepuscular ovation

Of your unfriendly neighborhood

Your haunted habitat has cracked

I am hatched again

Watch my tail fan

Fair, full and free