"Dear Red Cardinal"

Dear Cardinal, go ahead.

Push existence.

Push existence around with your little red wings and beak.
Glorify yourself because you are the Unknown Poetry Substance.

In this, you are no different than sportfucking, little red cardinal.

Sometimes I see you accidentally fly in
the Fuckme Building and over its artificial lake of questions.

The artificial lake of questions might actually be hosting
a wedding-in-progress, in which case
you might appear to be an omen.

Biblical even.

The women will clap their hands
and the men will run their hands over their semi-erect cocks
through their fine trouser weaves.

Then you fly out the other side
of the wedding into the watery oblivion you love.

The word for this is sky.

Any window or door will do.

You are a virtuous little cardinal at heart.
But you have never appeared Biblical to me.

Your heart beats so fast,
faster even than young poets publishing.

Flip through the snow.

Dear Red Cardinal, Be God.

Be a small naked red red cardinal
appearing giant next to a green Hyundai.

The jealousy of crows
feeds you a Prozac you use like a crowbar
in one of your poems
where you flap your wings just a bit.

You are a bird, can impersonate an angel,
but you have this trapped paw knee
thing going on you hate about yourself.

You agree you lack fluff control.

Thanks for charging me.
Thanks for eating my Tastykakes
all that winter. I liked that.

I think I could train you to land
on millefiori glass of certain sentences.

I think I could give you gifts
of Russian saint fear you might like.

In your little red cardinal heart.

Even your little red cardinal balls
dust the snow, make more sartorial glitter.

The dying humans hear your injunction
about no talking. They put it in their poems.

I like the way relating to you
is not a form of freedom, but more a comet

and its commentary. So many will die for you
like receptionists. Normal upbringing

could have saved many. But now we are left
the beauty of your phobic line spritzing through the snow.

Why worry about your little bit of red hell?
You may be promiscuous, and keep beautiful.

You get cached.

A great theological leap or prison dragnet
would not stop you. Nor will love

or our heart taxis. Dreams are dear to count our griefs,
but they may not count at all. To the red cardinal.

But how can we calculate the GNP of the little red cardinal?

Multiply luminous counterexamples, I guess.
Discount the animal's extinct reach for existence,

those who simulate or ejaculate lonely,
and the round-trip inferior form of poet.

What remains is the buzzed molecule, the fatal joy,
the red cardinal of you. The cunning function

of irony, the Megastar. Inspiration is a grifter
in the blowing snow. He is a princess and dreams only

of lavendar birds when he eats sunflower seeds from your palm.
He has a chubby soundtrack in his head of other bird children

he hates. His dinner table is the sky and he spreads
silverware there like Jeff Koons runes round museum plates.

The red cardinal is all that and a bag of chips
and all that is left of heaven.

There was this morning and you lost the receipt.

Even the retarded train was derailed
with the mami-papi avalanche in the night.

A tiara-wearing cat even will never eat you.
You are the Magic Red Cardinal of my Dreams!

You want to do good but you are flawed
by your great Jupiter rings of previous poems.

Nature lands in your nooks, crannies and vanities.
No, not language itself.

Think.

The grammar washed clothes.

We were rarer
than the end of someone's life.

We believed. We were wrong.

You are not like birds a tad observed.
You are like a jailhouse tattoo,

green eyelashes
in the prison night.

Do you fuck them
for their comments?

I mean the snowflakes, of course!

Those angels' eyelashes!

Thanks for visiting this painting
of you which leaks honey.

I would like to marry you, Dear Cardinal,
but you would need More Thighs.

The atavistic upswings of your eyes
leave me ambiguous forms of Love.

The way the snow is all similes
blowing through the headlights.

I can't marry that.

But I love your beautiful
disgusting headwound in the snow.

It makes me fear death less.

To know it is such an itty bitty message.

That perches on a stick or stone or cock.

And the subject (at last) is not art.

But something else. Freedom?

The poem is a douche.

It finds its way around lovely.

At last, at last!

Dear Red Cardinal,

Congratulations on your Rejection
by a shopping cart.

I will write that on all my Xmas cards this year!

I used to pretend to be Gummi worms
just to lure you, dear Cardinal.

But you told me to Get an Afterlife.

And I did.

And now you are left to pray to the snow.

And a cardinal stays out late.

In the blowing wind of snow

which is called poetry or bait or sometimes "Wait."