• Smiling and spread wings
    And you shot him in the street
    And he still loves you.

    Show me reason.
    Show me a coral reef:
    Centuries to create
    Days to blacken.
    Show me ivory:
    Decades to grow
    Seconds to harvest.
    Show me reason.

    Give me love
    And watch me taste it, test it.
    This is bitter,
    Cultivated with weed killer and herbicides
    So when I look for an acrid tang
    I receive the dead.

    Bitten by lead poisoning,
    He smiles for you.

    Water is eternity,
    and rivers can only dilute
    Pollutants in your eyes.
    The essence remains because
    The smoke of a smoldering gun
    Stains.

    Pristine colors want so badly to drip from your eyes
    I’m watching it
    Hearing it cry out
    “Do you even love me?”
    To your over-sensitive ears.
    It traces where his hand traced
    Down your cheek from your eyelashes
    Past green sublimity
    Leaving tracks as it cleans
    Onto your nose and past your lip
    Down past it to your chin
    And the past drops off and to the ground
    While your hand quivers with a smoker’s cough,
    Shooting again to justify
    Trying to make the smile falter
    Trying to break glass
    Trying to kill an angel.

    This wasn’t formulated
    And I think I can love you, now that he’s gone
    But I almost think I’d rather love him
    Because of how much more he was.
    Lying there, he looks like a coral reef.
    I’d like you to witness him.
    You can’t harvest his ivory,
    So give him something back.

    Dropping from heaven,
    Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate deserts.
    Part of a drizzle that will only come
    Now and again.

    For now
    He’s dead.
    And all that’s left is a bloody feather.

    Does it feel… cut short?