We Sleep Beneath Birds - Amanda Joy

I didn’t catch your name.
Still,
here I am,
wondering what the point is;

In this perfection
we grow like fingernails
Will we ever stop?
No.
We might be cut or nibble-bitten
or ground down by work.
Yet we become and become
Until we die
and then maybe
we become something else,
then, some more.
I’d buy that book.
Has it been written?
The one that tells us what happens
when we stop becoming.
Some of us think we have
already.
Yes, like death
Truth.
If you find it I will lay with you
and let you scratch my back
with your fingernails,
while I search for it.
Yes
it is an invisible word,
there, not here.
So tonight, without names
We will sleep beneath birds.
Unlike umbrellas, our heads
above our bodies
swallowing glittering tears
before pride’s useless withered hand.
In the face of this
pinnacle of pleasing angles
obscuring our view
of details not meaningless.
As none we are.
As we are.
Hand-tinted as stars met
by ladders that end
twenty feet above the ground.
Your name is a script, illiterate.
On a delta of my hand’s palms
let me gift you
my resistance,
yes,
so we meet


*Amanda Joy