Lovebirds

What we declare often sounds bizarre. Cowbirds
sing titi, titi, titi. European starlings

laugh out loud. As mother of Imperial Rome, Livia
kept nightingales caged. Captivity

inspires beautiful songs. The New Zealand kakapo
digs an amphitheater in the hills,

transmits beat-boxing for as far as four miles. Most
passionate singers will not fly off.

Elvis gurgled like a meadowlark, shook his pelvis
for the chicks. Certain chickens

hatch without a cock. Let’s talk turkey: Great tits
eat bats. We make cocktail hour

happy. Spread the word by tweet. My turtle dove
knows the way home by heart.

Misinformation

Leonardo de Vinci said his cock could think. Metaphor
creates misunderstandings we later regret. The cuckoo
cries over the city of the dead. I see a votive uterus
looks like a grenade, a pomegranate armed with seeds.
I see a sword and sandal film in which the actors’ lips
don’t sync with words. How many numbers do we have
to misdial? We have bullshit to call. We call home
a plate on which the runner steps. To the femme fatale
who made me feel like flying, I’ve been grounded
since we made love last. I’ve fallen for so many beauties
I could not see collapse. My therapist asks me to lie
on the couch. Back on the farm, grandmother’s martinis
made grandfather talk. Maybe the first communion
was when Egyptians drank wine from altar-shaped cups.
What’s unbelievable is my drug of choice. How dumb
gladiators looked to the crowd I could not attest.
The Roman crosswalk is dangerous. People are struck
by the Colosseum. Simone de Beauvoir imagined cocks
were smarter than men. Sophocles held his own penis
responsible for crimes. There are times I need correction.
I can’t learn without detention. Misinformation spreads
from cell to cell. Cancer sticks in the throat. Socrates
said your words corrupt your thoughts. That cocaine
inspired psychology sounds like truth. I could use a line.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigarette. Literature
is a telephone on which you can’t make two-way calls.
Players once read matchbooks by candlelight.
The international operator has my number. I date myself
every time I read another book.

The Examined Life

All I want is to light a woman’s cigarette, to see
in her eyes, myself, a match

framed in fire. Pigeons remind me of Narcissus
when they drink from puddles.

Under the microscope, people look like chimps.
In labs, we act like labs, retrieve

information bytes. A Hellenistic master’s marble
mastiff looks like he looks back.

In Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, the damned
drop to the chapel floor. Must we

see our future in the past? In whose field of vision
are we put out to pasture? Bernini

held his leg in flames as he looked in the mirror,
saw what spirit in the face of pain

could make a saint joke as he was braised. Maybe
it’s better if we study our loafers.

Whitman saw poetry in his own body. Diogenes
lived like a dog. For every Greek

extolling the examined life, a German shepherd
looks in the mirror and barks.