In Arima

“Never, ever kill the Ghoulbird.”

Coiled, cold lights drowse through the night.

The backbone of the dragon

Is the river of heaven

And the spiral labyrinth,

Hungry monster for a heart,

The plumed serpent, the typhoon,

And just an ordinary

Galaxy in a cosmos

Swimming with them. All of that.

To our eyes it looks the same

Or similar at all scales,

In each black and shining scale.

How clever of us to guess

We could make stories of this.

We’re lusty nestlings cheeping

In our nest on a high branch

Of a great tree on a cliff,

And when we’re not just screaming

For regurgitated flesh

Or leveraging ourselves,

The better to shove siblings

Over the edge to find death,

We’re blinking, chirping softly

To the branches overhead.

We don’t know why we do this.

We don’t know what our songs mean.

We sing nightly anyway,

Making up stories of home,

Melodic names. Arima.

Our mountains, our trees, our nest.

We love when day blinds the stars,

And we dream of taking flight,

But we were hatched by monsters

And sing sweetest to the night.