Dog Music II
Andrew Byrds
I know if you have an ear listen and behold
the holy one has anointed me in the last hour
seven angels seven lanterns seven stars seven letters the unseen bird
holy holy holy I ate the scroll the moon was full of the blood of virgins
—Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You
Chipped black fingernail paint like a buckshot of pilfered stars
In the negative calloused space clutching glass, and goddamn
The mirror and its forty year stains swathed by and by.
I remember blue and its rapture, the same hue of frost likely
Settled in the empty fields back home where the pine burns
And my dog buried beneath the clothesline five years dead
And gone, but back to the eyes cracked by crows feet splayed
Age a word that creeps on you and hangs its meat from your spine,
27 years is an awfully long time but here I am thinning yet quiet
Threading rosemary stems through my gums in a shoegaze
Mostly I dream, Frank despaired, but no rather he admired
A reality of such shit fire indifference towards breathing wounds,
That’s me and possibly you, dragging split wires from the mess.
Listen for the mooncries they come when needed, they’re always needed,
The eyes of stillborn calves or peroxide spitting up against pitch
I tend to see everything but the moon up there but I hear its pain
Usually I deny this pain but it gets lonely and it gets me thinking
Of clubs and their members and their numbers and their romance
Their dances and their futures and their art nailed upon skinned doors.
Hells bells sailor if a body could slide right through the night open
Right into the mouth of another and another and another
Andrew Byrds is a queer writer based in Portland, OR who has had works appear in Philosophical Idiot, PUBLIC POOL, Red Fez, Entropy, tl;dr magazine, and Trash Panda Poetry