The Drinking Bird

O brother

I thought that we were bound
in this together, your suffering, mine.
Victims as porous as sponge.

But the nether thread of you
wove like a needle through my mouth
sewing it shut for forty years.

                                                            Drink drink
                                                            I am the perpetual
                                                            bird, I pivot with
                                                            paper eyes and top hat,
                                                            the red liquid of my body rising into
                                                            my head until I can't
                                                            think, falling back
                                                            like a shot of
                                                           scotch

toward my heart
where I can't feel.
 
O mother

your complacent voice
intimate with pain and on the prowl
while my swollen lip battered by habit
blooms, hard as a callous.

But I can close my eyes
and I can bow spread-eagle
on a sacrificial crosspiece for you.