Here's a Pill
       

The night is a knife standing on end. There's a bird outside in the darkness, singing alone. If you don't like yourself here's a pill. It's yellow, like the flowers planted outside the home you want to sell. There may be something left of your heart, that crazy midnight bird plotting against its cage. The night will be still. The trees will hang like treasonous soldiers. You can preserve the knife and let the bird exhaust the tree at 3:00 a.m., the astonished night like a dark pill in your empty gullet, or you can let your shrunken body free in the song where your pill self waits to be born.

                                                                        ~

There's a bird outside in the darkness singing alone beside your yellow flowers and nobody bought the house today. The pill you want to sell hangs in the bird's gullet like 3:00 a.m. If your heart is a knife, the song is a shrunken body towing you through the night like that crazy bird carrying your sleep in its hard cleft mouth. Nothing will be left of the house. The cage conspires against its bird. In another pill, a bird waits to be born. You can exit the house and free the bird. The new owners will want to know what pill whimpers there like a knife waiting for execution. If the flowers won't hawk the house, here's a pill.

                                                                        ~

Outside the name you want to sell, flowers perch like yellow gizzards. The yellow pill sings in the night, alone. The darkening house is what you call your body at 3:00 a.m. when the bird's mouth is a difficult shell and the house your only sharpened tool. If you can't find the bird, here's a pill. Here's a knife standing on end in the only house you recognize. The new owners will want to know why the pill sings and the bird doesn't. You will answer that the pill has shrunken the bird inside your gullet, where it contrives to keep sleep at knife's edge, the flowers in a porcelain bowl, and your name like the night ebbing from the bird's beak, waiting for the pill to sustain it.

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Copyright © 2021 Nikki Moustaki All rights reserved
from Extremely Lightweight Guns
Red Hen Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission