A Goldfinch is a bluebird is a soul

There is a goldfinch I keep

On a 3-inch chain

Between my ribs.

Bukowski had his Bluebird

And I know I have copied his methods.

The whisky and the pills and the whores and the cigarette smoke.

And I felt the tapping at the ribs.

Small fractures at times where maybe, maybe it could reach free.

Someone could hear it sing at least.

For what is a voice without a song?

What is a poem without a touch?

What is a person without a soul?

Bukowski had it wrong.

His bluebird suffered and tried to sing

On rusted vocal chords.

 Barbed wire to hands is a cage to

A living thing.

Pain is more

When you finally show that

Thing with feathers

That perches on the soul

And are told that it’s not right.

I never had the right kind of bird.

I never had the right kind of heart.

My cripple-bird, my crooked heart.

So the chain got shorter and the nights got longer,

Ribs soundproof with pills and buried self.

Cutting my mouth into a smile,

Shaving my skin down by millimeters every day.

Plastic wrapping my body to keep it still

No sounds.

Nothing real nothing safe no self.

Unrecognizable to me.

But the razors and the masks and the mirrors

And the silence,

It hurt more than my

Wrong-bird.

I peeled the plastic back like lily petals.

Regrew the pieces of my body I had cut and changed and dyed given.

Now I don’t stich a smile.

“I can tell you’re not a ghost anymore. You’ve come back to us.”

I made a ring from my goldfinch’s chain.

I wear it as a promise

that I will never own another cage.