I saw the yard wide open filled with bleached tree trunks
emptier than bones. The dead garden struck me like
my own confessions set to the difficulties of songs
fashioned by small birds and at the driveway my
mind began cracking open like the pavement's
silent verse, filled with a concrete degradation
of soil's softness spread about the earth.

As for the hospital's intervention, the nurses
really hung their words at the gallows where
frail meanings break their necks before
rebellion saw its birth. The rooms missed
artistic expression and smelled cold like
a dead bird taken from the freezer before
cooking in the hearth.

Patched up effortlessly by some pills and cognac,
then discarded to the Earth.

Made difficult by old musics cliched conclusions
and the perfect circles drawn vicious by coins
leaning against art's worth. Made easy by
idiot watches counting numbers lost even
when you come in first place.

I saw the formula for oceans in the tired
waves sweeping shorelines around shipwrecks
I heard the gulls open up like conversation
as the ravens warned of storms and the
spirits of dead captains lined up to navigate
hell for the chance of brandy beyond the
hurricane horizon.

It was Earth;
I could feel it,
it was home and not on drugs,
it didn't drink
but ate only mangoes
and flowers on a path
too difficult for solitude to traverse
with its heavy pack. But here,
the sea wind conceals the swirls
of gasoline, the ocean burgeons
before the waste of ships and
the streets burn with so much
false light that you no longer
want to keep your eyes open to belief.

The birds I sent you in those letters,
did they sound like the lines I erased?
The winds I gathered for envelopes,
did they sound like fate collecting feathers
strewn where oceans end in desert?