Days and Nights (Mostly Nights)

Distress

There are little brown birds always

and everywhere;

this one, like them all,

has clamped herself to an eave

in some high corner. Overlooked,

she gapes a dunny beak

and not to sing.

That chest, walnutty,

that would crumble like old winters’ leftovers

under foot or even

a steady thumb

jumps, crumples and jumps

back into the drowning heat

Out. In. And out.

It keeps up. In that breezeless

dark corner she sways,

a smudgy belly and

a gray asshole, that sparrow-tongue

too small to be more than briefly,

is pink; it sputters out

in and out.

She is not anything, this trinket,

some glass-eyed, dusty

wire-foot toy

bellows on a bitch of a summer day

- not much to see and no one watching,

but not nothing. Now,

at least, not nothing.