Crow

You’re the philosopher of funk, reading salvation in opossum entrails
on the roadside with your cock-eyed musings and morning call.

Street smart, you see art in the fine stink of distinction as you two-step
traffic in an awkward hump and flap to continue your close reading

of carcass. The ultimate deconstructionist, you pick each text in the holy rite
of dismemberment, gorging on the relativity of the body and ooze of

after thought; calling into question the very word, “ruin.” Oh, dark god
of afterlife, you sense in decay the apocrypha of salvation. Oh,

hawk chaser, defender of the decomposed, you never forget a face,
in your wink and nod, picking it eyeless like a holy relic. Each martyr bone

is for your séance of one chanted in your strange morphology of tongue.
Oh, confessor of the fetid, you caw from the Book of Shadows a myth

of resurrection into question, then in your bone yard dance of redemption,
you prick the locks of the body bare in your split-tongued spell.

For this is your baptism of stench. This, your holy rant for rain, death is
but a black catechism caught mid-croak rising in your throat,

the muttered reflux of forever. Or, is it just more dark sarcasm in your
blue-black stutter and limp, a final, eulogized holy joke?

First Published in The Orchards Poetry Journal (November 2018)
Forthcoming in The Lost Books of the Bestiary (V Press LC, 2021)