some crows

               

A crow attacked me on the way home from the milk store. It wanted me to reckon its genius. It kept screaming in that horrible crow voice, "I reckoned yours! Cawwk! I reckoned yours!" as its claws dug in my hair and bloodied my scalp.

And it went up and down furiously, like some sort of masturbation device.

     *     *     *

I was at the bank talking to a handsome young teller with thick eyebrows like autumn caterpillars. I love those. I was just telling him how to break down my cash, what denominations, when the crow that I had been carrying around on my shoulder croaked out suddenly, "Suck my dick? Suck my cock?"

I quickly gathered up my money and hightailed it out.

     *     *     *

I was at a beloved relative's funeral.

The minister was reciting a poem that I knew the dead woman would have hated.

Just then we all heard a series of disgusting sounds coming from the coffin surrounded by such lovely banks of flowers, rainbow bouquets of love.

Then we all saw it: several crows busily engaged. In eating the deceased.

They had been working her pretty good, because they were pulling out stringy bits at this point, working hard as a fat man will on crab legs at a buffet restaurant.

They were making a horrible racket, screaming at each other too.

"Will the person who brought these beasts kindly remove them from the dearly departed's innards? Thank you very much."

The minister's poem had derailed, as poems are wont to do anyway.

I sheepishly gathered my crows up and ran towards the parking lot.

     *     *     *

We were making love.

We had each other exactly where we wanted each other.

It was sort of nasty it was so pleasurable in a non-stop way.

I was your bitch and you were mine. In and out. Through and through.

And then I noticed a crow's shadow on your one ass cheek.

Then suddenly a flock of them, flying between our bodies, screaming the way they did in Van Gogh's fucked up paintings or on medieval battlefields after everbody went home.

Pretty soon we couldn't even see each other.

There was a furious screaming black ball of wings between us.

It sort of turned me on.

You gave up and went off to make a grilled cheese sandwich.

I fucked with the crows' heads, and sang Madonna songs to them until they vomited.

It was just another form of asshole aggression.

I ignored it.

     *     *     *

I was at a job interview.

One of the crows I had brought was fucking the other crow I had brought.

Noisily.

Right under the interviewer's nose.

He kept trying to finish his sentences, but had a crooked eye that couldn't keep off the gruesomeness of the spectacle.

"Take it bitch!" the crow on top screamed as the one on bottom shrieked like a murder victim.

"They're almost finished," I said by way of apology.

     *     *     *

You were sleeping in a bed in Montana.

I had sent one of my crows to watch you sleep.

He had a little video-cam on his head. I had made a cute little chin strap out of black silk ribbon that held the cam in place.

He perched in a dark high corner of your room.

Like a Gauguin shadow spirit, he broadcast the images to me.

Until he grew interested in some of your socks and underwear on the floor.

His beak nudged and played with them, as I screamed "No! NO!" panicked in Pennsylvania.

Then I saw your kitchen.

He was eating one of your muffins.

Then the screen went blank.

If you killed him, I understand.

This is all so embarrassing.

     *     *     *

People I loved were gathered around my hospital bed.

They were trying to say goodbye to me.

But I kept hugging my flock of crows closer to me.

The birds were being very complaisant, and I looked like an evil fairy tale queen with all my shiny black wings.

It felt good. It felt right.

Dying this way.

The last thing I remember is seeing some of you between the protective wings of my legion. You were playing with my remote control.

And saying stupid shit about the dignity of death.

Shit on the dignity of death.

I was gangbanging in Greece with a few young and tan gods, if you would only shut up and let me get back to the best part of dying.

Every family should keep a morphine kit in the kitchen.

All family gatherings should come with those morphine clickers hospice patients use.

One for each hand.

     *     *     *

The President was on national t.v. trying to speak.

He kept swatting at a crow that was flying about his head and Stuka dive-bombing him.

A secret service agent had just run off screaming like a little girl.

"Just give me a chance," the President begged.

The crow shit on his face, his podium, his teleprompter.

"Mercy for those who feed on the dead!" the crow screamed like an activist.


     *     *     *


I had insomnia.

I had insomnia for thirty-seven years.

I sat in a chair staring at the staticky white surface of the television screen.

After a while, the static started to look like plum blossoms in a Chinese poem.

The crows were flying into the white boil of static and out again.

Showing off.

Their screams sounded like laughter as they melted into the t.v screen the way the Boston airliner seemed to just vanish into the mirror of the World Trade Center building.

The crows flew about my insomnia.

And not a single fucking one of them would take a message to you.

Though I had asked repeatedly.

"You feed them, and then they bury you," I said like any asshole parent.

"They bury you."


     *     *     *


You were getting married without my permission.

I sent my crows as a wedding present.

When your handsome spouse opened the box he screamed, because a plague of crows attacked him the way the paparazzi attack Britney.

He ran towards you in front of 300 guests and then several of the crows burst into flames.

I used that blood from the shirt of Nessus.

I'm not always a nice guy.

But I like your smile.

How could you sleep with that guy?

Look, he's not even stopping, dropping and rolling.

And now he just ploughed through the wedding cake like a bull elephant who found out his elephantess is cheating.

What are you anyway?

A zookeeper?


     *     *     *


You were being born.

I sent my crows into my gorgeous new time machine I had just bought on EBAY.

They gathered you up, a warm reddish jewel.

And brought you to me.

Where I will raise you and feed you.

This time we're gonna do this thing right.


     *     *     *

It was a courtroom.

I was explaining poetry to a Judge who sat in judgment over me like an ugly cloud with hemorrhoids.

"I understand the jurisprudential discretion of your answers, and here is my reply," I said.

And then I unleashed hundreds of crows from the clothes I was wearing, including my lounge pants with the images of Stewie Griffin all over them.

I held down the bailiff while my crows feasted.

In five minutes there was a skeleton seated up there.

A skeleton with hemorrhoids.

I told them to leave them as an object lesson for the future.

The difficult future.

     *     *     *

I was dead and under the snow.

Crows came to shit on my grave occasionally and laugh.

Sometimes I reached up like Carrie and throttled one of them.

And he lay there all winter like a feather duster nobody wants.

And I would snicker sometimes.

Down there in my darkness.

Where I would have the Last Word.

Just you wait.

Death is just a stylistic quirk.

I can work with this.

As they say in the terrible movies, "Come with me if you want to live."