Bird Between Telegrams

Dear California, vineyards and sky blue sky keep people toasted and sleepy. Any day now

bebop will tinder dear, a sweet hunger crimsoned beyond

the ease of zoot—will thrum across miles of clear cut buffalo

and deliver me. This whip-slurred annotation will porkpie and pitch

a goodbye black marrow, a train station hollowed of umbrellas and wingtips,

badly missing its runaway trains. I am far, dear, a small husk salted

by the wrong ocean while the whole congregation gone whiplash, gone recoil

and sour hiss demands Sing familiar for the punchline, the wish bones

licked pre-fab. Dear California, says Sing a skin into more holes than I can buy time

to fill. Honey, will sear and buck and helix double. Bird

frictioned above dry martinis, freeze framed in the rafters

of a moldy suit jacket two sets a night—this mouth

wailing kingdoms needled into, small hours propped with cocktails, breathes honey,

conjugates riddle, threads the kiss like back draft, root ground venom,

graveyards behind their unmarked eyes. Between nettled streetlights and bluedark

this lullaby sprawls uncluttered air. Bird finds the vein. Breathes

honey, breathehoney—

Any day now it will catch. It will flare. It will hold.