Wings, His Mood.

His mood is like a shadow, that moves swiftly on
Its wings-
On abled beast, his harp it sings,
Like shattered, broken things-
In the dark, we weep like stars, and the night
Is a spell of words, and sorrows are broken,
And time is gone.
My mother said she was not a part of anything,

That she is not the part of the world that is between
Things. She speaks better than me, her thoughts are
Relinquished; she said she gave away medals once,
And a harp, to her next door neighbor, who had three
Cats, and seven pigeons that pooped in a well.

It isn’t like me to beat around the bush, and not say what I
Am supposed to say, it is not like me to speak,
When no one speaks, and everything is spoken in
Blades of grass, and Nature is wrought with the churning
Of the wind, and the clouds are taken like sorrows.

In and out, the harp sings like sorrows, and everything is folding
In the grass, and the spring is folding, and the light is folding,
And everything folds with it. The fear is there, the fear is sharp
And bitter as blades of grass, and we are far away, and far
Away is close to us, and everything around us is sharper than
The eye, and what we see like burnt pieces of wood.

The forest, the trees, the eyes see from far away, and everything
Is far away, like the roaring of the ocean, and the shadows
Pound at the doorway of the old house we lived in when I was three,
And the mother, and the father, and the brother, the tallest of the elms,
Sits back and watches everything drown.

The water is like Shadows, and the serpent opens its mouth, and
Everything moves with it, and in it, is the tongue of the beast,
The night time that speaks of stars, and wisdom, and trees.
My mother thought my life was not supposed to be like yesterday,

That we are above what we are, and death is not the end. Only the beginning
Of a forgotten war, the fiendish fiends, and all hope brings. Everything is what
It is, and nothing is what it seems. We are not the warriors of the night,
Of the screams of children as they play, and the pigeons scream from far away;
We are gone, and we decide, I open the front door and let the sunlight seep in.
Guilt eats me alive, like something that is a tree that stands tall, and guilt is not.

The Biscuit Maker.

I make biscuits every morning at the
bakery in Flint.
This has been my job for seventeen years.
Before that, I worked as a clerk at Payless
in Savannah, Georgia-we moved to Michigan
after my husband lost his job as a ups worker.

I was sad about that for awhile, sad we
lived off of food stamps and breadcrumbs
fighting for food like the pigeons
in the parking lot of a Walmart
store,
when all I wanted to do was make friends
and eat good food.

Every day I go into work and counted my blessings,
even though shaping the flour is even harder
than dealing with the customers who came in,
especially the young ones who want things Now, now,
now.

I wake up at six in the morning to go down to the
bakery,
where Darius, the manager, just opened the shop.
He was forty-five, three years younger than me.
It was insulting that he had a better life than me-
a wife; three kids; a nice home and car.

I have to work for everything I get, and even then,
it just isn't much.