At 3:45am,

I crawl up stairs to dig into shredded carpet, smarting boney ankles off the boards.
Sleep tears crust in my eye lashes and there’s a fingernail woven in the blanket somewhere but I can’t work out the plucking. Does anyone else write poems that bore themselves?

4:05am. What birds make these calls and chirps? I’ve heard them in every state I’ve lived in but not named. Melodramatic crows become unflocked, nooking into voids between branches.

A healthy mix of illness and anxiety nestles under my breast bone, sternum, ribs, cartilage. I wrote a resignation letter from society in my sleeplessness to prove a point. People are dying here and my heart is walled up, suffocating in its own life blood. I’m only capable of crying when I cannot sleep.

4:39am and a hazy, cornflower dawn is approaching. “Rain starting in 3 minutes.”
Are the butts of my palms broken or have I been driving them into my eye sockets?
The base of my ring finger hurts for no good reason. Thrumming its uncoupledness.

A male cardinal, crimson and violent, takes shelter under the spent crab apple. 4:55am. The rain loses tempo on the battered water spout. I think to go to the glass door but wrapped in a blanket, I am a Victorian ghost in this turn-of-a-century home and that might frighten the neighbors.

O, let’s try this again.

Antlers of July

The Japanese Maple waves its droplets at me, magenta gentle
like a necklace of cubic zirconia — this June that only rained
Been staring at the words “diamond simulates” & wondering why diamonds need stimulating

Falling backwards, smoker’s beige siding focuses in and out
Been reading a novel about such things, but we’re thinking differently about falling
There’s a downward spiral we don’t find ourselves out of—Does it ever get better outside of fiction?

I read about the buck moon in Capricorn, new beginnings and all that. 
But its top half was laced in clouds, obscuring its pale disk

The smoke stack of the water treatment plant emits a heart-shaped puff as I drive by, as if to mock me, racing fireworks another year.
I don’t need to have my fortune told
But what is the opposite of fireworks?

The screen tells me the severity is unknown, the urgency is unknown
Stopping mid-sidewalk to take in cerulean dandelions, fuchsia centers, champagne sparklers—everyone should have a sparkler on their birthday

Smoke stack returns to columns, sulfur, and skunk.