Megan Gileza

Something About the Empire of the Birds

after Beneath the Empire of the Birds by Carl Watson

 

I.

 

You say there’s a city

a grid

lines network lines form cage lines

trapped

lines that make bridges

 

that are always broken.

You say it’s Chicago,

and also everywhere:

men sitting in hotel rooms with solid walls

and wire ceilings

 

where they can hear the voices

that surround them

but can’t see the people.

 

Whiskey, cigar.

A man tries

to ignore the television

but the images always reach him, reflected

off of the sides of city sky scrapers

through windows that don’t close

 

and he is stuck in the grid

because there is no other way to be

 

but alone and wishing the world was different

somehow. Everyone is connected

in that we’re miserably failing

in our search for human connection.

(At least that’s fantastically ironic.)

 

II.

 

You paint dreams, of color, red

not love

blood, meat

dog mouth tearing

death-fetus

street-corpse

yellow sunshine sick

life green grotesque

dirt, back to earth

insects, cockroach

 

crawling out of a crack

bringing us back to a version of human self

that existed millennia ago,

a reversion to primal purity.

 

There’s a memory, an instinct

feeling that there’s some place that’s pure

brought on by the smell of the sea

somehow connected to our central,

inner human

 

before all of the philosophical

brain-washing

 

sea water thirst drinking liquid booze

still unquenchable

drink, get drunk

but it doesn’t quench our thirst because it can’t

fill the emptiness. Try

love, religion, liquor

fill the emptiness

fill our lungs in attempts to escape it

drown

 

in our bodies 90% water

water cycle equals water trapped

we are water

insignificant, cycle inescapable

seasick from our own heartbeats

pulsing, churning, urinate

but we can’t be rid of what we inherently are,

nothing can.

 

III.

 

You say something about how an umbilical cord

is our only true nurturing human connection.

We can’t uncut that shit,

 

but we find a new mommy,

a cultural cord that feeds us ideas

about all the ways life is lacking

but you say it’s not, not really

because elevating is just a dream.

 

Dream of bridges

literal bridges

huge bridges (above water)

that span the gaps between what we are

and what we wish we were

expanding the city into the sky—

 

bridges that should connect

us to something but don’t,

never do

never will.

You say, you are an animal;

 

love is unattainable

connectedness is unattainable.

Air is attainable

earth is attainable

food is attainable

sex is attainable.

Love is not attainable.

 

And we will never be satisfied by love

because we will never really find it

because the bridges are forever broken

(a.k.a. it doesn’t exist)

and we are focused on ourselves

discontent

more than on the way we experience

other people

and red means blood, not love

we do it to ourselves.

 

We are each the center of our own universe

in this grid cage construct social

inescapable only reality that matters life, but

in another reality

we’re animals

crawling on an Earth

revolving around a Sun

that doesn’t even know we exist.

 

We’ve convinced ourselves

we can fly away like birds

but we can’t.

We’re the worms.

 

I get it. We really aren’t made

for these grids that we’ve made

and can’t escape.

And we can’t be happy because we can’t accept that

we really aren’t made to be more than we are

and yet we try, Watson.

We see the birds fly above the lines

and we try.