I am without
recompense, primitive in a way
with my wings and burnt hands,
with my heart carved from the chest
of you, my small and fragile sparrow
— amends are not my way.
I am the fractious one
leered over the eaves
of the cathedral, your grace
peppered with stone cold rain
and the cruel intents of the masons’
maul, your tortures real
and imagined clustered as if
sieged upon your precious,
precious walls — even now perched
above that oh so secular square
littered with such garden variety
grotesqueries you cannot help
but scale these ponderous
blocks counting lepers as you go,
counting madness and the malformed
heads of heretics — beasts so amply
endowed with veracity as to make
those rosette windows so suddenly gray.
Sweet and Bitter Greens 