Second Nightingale

Lo Kwa Mei-En

# 22

                                   …it must be a fable, invented by those who had written the book.

Desire cut the tale in half, each into a mouth lightning leaves.

Quills rot beneath the loam of the year. Time used language.

In part to tell a lie I didn’t know I bore like a starved bone.

Performance fed it, until the hunger recited me on its own.

Love isn’t where I allowed the book to go. Time used fury.

Flattened my tongue’s direction, revised my childish hand.

Beyond service in the kingdom. In the end, it was salvation.

To gut my desire for salvation. A feather hymn that sank.

To the soil of the sea, divorcing horizon and distances between.

Me and my body, which was, in the beginning, a generosity.

To cut cleanly into narrative, remove the window. See it.

Fluttering out, a long truth, as long as you touch me, down to.

Adolescence of perpetual void. I am three decades rising.

Green, and fear forgiveness erases the girl I will never mean.

 #22

 …it must be a fable, invented by those who had written the book.

Desire cut the tale in half, each into a mouth lightning leaves.

Quills rot beneath the loam of the year. Time used language.

In part to tell a lie I didn’t know I bore like a starved bone.

Performance fed it, until the hunger recited me on its own.

Love isn’t where I allowed the book to go. Time used fury.

Flattened my tongue’s direction, revised my childish hand.

Beyond service in the kingdom. In the end, it was salvation.

To gut my desire for salvation. A feather hymn that sank.

To the soil of the sea, divorcing horizon and distances between.

Me and my body, which was, in the beginning, a generosity.

To cut cleanly into narrative, remove the window. See it.

Fluttering out, a long truth, as long as you touch me, down to.

Adolescence of perpetual void. I am three decades rising.

Green, and fear forgiveness erases the girl I will never mean.

#22       

…it must be a fable, invented by those who had written the book.

Desire cut the tale in half, each into a mouth lightning leaves.

Quills rot beneath the loam of the year. Time used language.

In part to tell a lie I didn’t know I bore like a starved bone.

Performance fed it, until the hunger recited me on its own.

Love isn’t where I allowed the book to go. Time used fury.

Flattened my tongue’s direction, revised my childish hand.

Beyond service in the kingdom. In the end, it was salvation.

To gut my desire for salvation. A feather hymn that sank.

To the soil of the sea, divorcing horizon and distances between.

Me and my body, which was, in the beginning, a generosity.

To cut cleanly into narrative, remove the window. See it.

Fluttering out, a long truth, as long as you touch me, down to.

Adolescence of perpetual void. I am three decades rising.

Green, and fear forgiveness erases the girl I will never mean.

# 60

                                                     “I shall break the artificial bird into a thousand pieces.”

Rivered by waste, baptized in blood—if a man had also gone under, he earned
My devotion, its three hearts plattered and heaving on the busted mirror.

The ruin who died, then stayed alive, matured into a fractal of home. Its sills, feathered with the
              Daily fluids of doves, have always raised
Tidings of my arctic, addict’s cinder

Licking bone. You screamed like an animal when you came in, she said. I can’t keep finding you
On the floor like that. I can’t do this. There is no memory of what spilled from my

Appeal but bile and roses clung to the messenger from an underworld
Blooming. Then nothing—not poetry, nor a love mimicking love—that could

Take me home but the fix. When I stopped drinking, I lost my voice
I loved, in part for praise it collected, somewhere under defensive trees. Poems

Bled out of listless parts, winter licking the hall like a cloud, the temperature diving,
             Dividing the mirrors windows become when false light cuts the gaze out of
             The inside of the house. That was that.
A tributary does not run to the ocean, and it will not come back.

Failure, I said, and I was right. The voice was mortal. In the end,
No form could contain it.

# 60

                                                     “I shall break the artificial bird into a thousand pieces.”

Rivered by waste, baptized in blood—if a man had also gone under, he earned
My devotion, its three hearts plattered and heaving on the busted mirror.

The ruin who died, then stayed alive, matured into a fractal of home. Its sills, feathered with the
              Daily fluids of doves, have always raised
Tidings of my arctic, addict’s cinder

Licking bone. You screamed like an animal when you came in, she said. I can’t keep finding you
On the floor like that. I can’t do this. There is no memory of what spilled from my

Appeal but bile and roses clung to the messenger from an underworld
Blooming. Then nothing—not poetry, nor a love mimicking love—that could

Take me home but the fix. When I stopped drinking, I lost my voice
I loved, in part for praise it collected, somewhere under defensive trees. Poems

Bled out of listless parts, winter licking the hall like a cloud, the temperature diving,
             Dividing the mirrors windows become when false light cuts the gaze out of
             The inside of the house. That was that.
A tributary does not run to the ocean, and it will not come back.

Failure, I said, and I was right. The voice was mortal. In the end,
No form could contain it.

# 60

“I shall break the artificial bird into a thousand pieces.”

Rivered by waste, baptized in blood—if a man had also gone under, he earned
My devotion, its three hearts plattered and heaving on the busted mirror.

The ruin who died, then stayed alive, matured into a fractal of home. Its sills, feathered with the
              Daily fluids of doves, have always raised
Tidings of my arctic, addict’s cinder

Licking bone. You screamed like an animal when you came in, she said. I can’t keep finding you
On the floor like that. I can’t do this. There is no memory of what spilled from my

Appeal but bile and roses clung to the messenger from an underworld
Blooming. Then nothing—not poetry, nor a love mimicking love—that could

Take me home but the fix. When I stopped drinking, I lost my voice
I loved, in part for praise it collected, somewhere under defensive trees. Poems

Bled out of listless parts, winter licking the hall like a cloud, the temperature diving,
             Dividing the mirrors windows become when false light cuts the gaze out of
             The inside of the house. That was that.
A tributary does not run to the ocean, and it will not come back.

Failure, I said, and I was right. The voice was mortal. In the end,
No form could contain it.