I Never Kept a Dollar Past Sunset
       

We only know death when we are young,
and the sky is full of dead bodies.

I see a streak of bird bloating with afternoon wind
and call it gone before it ever swells

into the teeth of a windshield.

The words in my mouth were put there by my mother.
And every world I have lived in is nothing but windows.

Each funeral is replaced by sunrises full of worn-out gods.
Kneecaps of clouds thin & gray like a lover's hairpin.

Keith Richards doing lines of coke cut with his father's ashes.
Intrepids of daffodils blooming through car crashes.

I imagine if I ever grow wings, they'll be sutured to my arms
by my mother's arthritic hands.

The things that made us will always find a way
to crawl back into our grieving mouths.

Our bodies nothing but an alphabet of receding fingers

gifted by women who were born from women
who invented language.

Language engraved from the songs of bodies
once so weightless they eclipsed with the sun.

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Copyright © 2021 Matt Mitchell All rights reserved
from The Neon Hollywood Cowboy
Big Lucks Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission