Crows

Are drinkers of mulled wine

Mints to disguise the alcohol breath

In the backs of roman churches you will find them

Lighting votive candles

Die and yet they don’t die

Nests ludicrously untidy

All humans who worked in vaudeville

Are related to crows

But they won’t admit it

Claiming originality as the original sin

Crows have a gigantic body,

Composed of thousands,

Moving like an inky cloud of pumping crow’s hearts,

Like a text balloon moving forth from the lips of god,

Here and then gone,

Like all miraculous revelations,

Chopped into tiny pieces by the scientists,

Who never smile in public for if they do,

Between their teeth,

The remnants of crow feathers,

Fingers stained with the orange of beaks.

Their wives have left them

For their habit of inhaling raw meat,

Cawing in the basement,

Moving their arms as if they were feathered wings,

Hooking the backs of their knees over branches when the children are watching.

Humans also have a gigantic body,

Composed of thousands,

Moving like an inky cloud,

Wars for instance, rock concerts.

That’s why crows are studying us,

To find out why we watch pictures of other people copulating,

Stick bayonets into one another

Or walk about in public with things stuck in our ears.

Crow scientists have long lists of our wierd behavior

And seek to find crow reasons for them, one by one,

Until humans are fully known,

And thus unable to blow crows up with dynamite,

Or inject them with noxious substances,

Or shoot them with steel pellets,

And they store all these things in their crow brains,

Which are small, yes, but that’s because

They serve as portals to the entire universe,

Which is where crows live, connected to everything,

Intoxicated with sun and air and moon,

Especially the moon, loved extravagantly by crows,

Who murmur appreciatively when it hangs in their trees

And whose favorite legend is of a crow,

Wearing a veil of moonlight,

Breast filled with radiant sun,

Who knows all about crows and all about humans and all about god

But she won’t tell anyone

For she knows such knowledge would destroy them.