Boulevard Blackbird (Breakfast for One)

The angels smashed all of my windows

In an attempt to out-do the sky,

Then sat obtuse as gargoyles on the side of the city

And poked around the sleeping stone

That rattled with dream-dealers

And rubble addicts, inhaling pieces of fallen sky

And injecting politics at Café de Paris socials,

Where society girls sold characters in the powder room

And patched up vogue wounds with dollar tattoos.

The city welcomes all they say;

It doesn’t care who it swallows and breaks,

Its mouth-waves consuming country dowries 

And spitting out broken lego-men and plastic dolls

On rain-shattered gravel.

Some get a bone to hang on their wall

When they crawl back to their shells with a beat face,

But others find solace in the shade of a tenement slum fire-escape;

Singing moon river to a crisp-packet puppet

And melting into the cataleptic landscape

That plays tin-can melismas on cobbled floors.

Not Her though.

She was bored of picking up the sky,

And was on the road to disprove the ground,

A boulevard blackbird

Rocking around to a city jingle of coins and keys,

Her eyes filled with ocean and left-over sun.

She preferred to live as a ghost on windows,

With a back to front reflection that let her drift

Around the city on glass without getting trapped,

Her feet kept firmly off of the pavement slabs

That snarled with cracked, soil-laced lips.

She drank her coffee in a haze of diamond smoke,

Before sipping at champagne shadows 

Under hollywood billboards and
Strumming guitar strings on a self-made window-ledge.

To toast the aftershock of a double-dip recession,

She traced galaxies on her carpet and

Painted the walls red with fingerprints and lips.

But her eyes were always fixed.

With one on the highest tree,

And the other on the rain bird, plucking its own feathers

In an ashtray as its soul was lost in city lights

And it'd forgotten how to fly.

I only met her once, when the city was embalmed in dust,

And the angels'd decided it was open-window season again,

Throwing bricks through the panes so we’d all know 

How it felt to live in the sky.

She'd packed her bags and was skipping down the stairs 

When she stopped and whispered:

‘Some know themselves too well...

And some learn too late to leave a crumb trail to find

Everything they’ve thrown away.’

She sighed then, exhaling a little heart,

Before having breakfast with herself one last time in the big window,

And flying away to get lost in the sky

With all the other things people would never be able to love.