The Poetry Marathon

cw: none

Another pair of kind hands
entered the room. The canary
tried to be good, like it
knew it was supposed to
be. The kind hands were
gentle, and helped patch
it up, and made sure the
curtains were open. But it
was too much – the canary
bit those kind hands. They
did not retaliate, but they
did leave: and the canary
knew, like all the times
before, the hands would
not return.

cw: none

The canary hates when the curtains are open –
it hates the light, the bright,
the thousand stars.
It hates what a clear-view window tells it,
what it wishes it could not see.
Ignorance is bliss:
hands that hurt are wrong,
and what it knows it cannot stop knowing.
It wishes:
close the curtains.
Leave it to its darkness and vellum,
leave it to its black-ink blood and poetry:
voiceless, wingless –
but now that it knows
if the curtains are closed
it would miss it.

cw: none

When the canary bites gentle hands,
two things happen:
the canary gets hurt
or they leave, and never come back.

It doesn’t want to bite.
It pulls out its own feathers,
as penance for its sins,
and starves itself off its vellum diet.

It knows better;
it knows to not bite.
So then why…
why does it keep biting?

cw: none

The canary likes to count the stars
and dream about being up there.
At night, when it is supposed to sleep,
it calls the stars its friends
and dreams of
soft, gentle hands
that never hurt.

cw: none

When the canary dreams,
its wings are whole.
It flies, and it sings,
and it is surrounded by others,
just like it.
And the dream
is beautiful.

cw: none

The canary wasn’t sure what to think:
suddenly, in its isolated life –
after the day with the open window
– someone new came into the room.
They did not feed it vellum flowers,
or make it bleed black ink;
they gave it seeds,
and bandaged up still-bleeding wounds.
Not knowing how to react,
the canary bit.
They left, and
it knew
this was deserved.

cw: allusions to abuse/cycles of abuse, all metaphorical though

It was impossible to predict
when hands would be gentle or cruel.
Sometimes, hands would feed it
its self-imposed diet of poetry;
and other times, those same hands
would try to starve it
and eat its heart.
The canary knew to never take for granted
when the hands were gentle –
and to also, never assume
that the hands would be cruel.
Sometimes they weren’t.

The day after the curtains were opened,
the canary thought
maybe
it was not supposed to be like that at all.

cw: none

One morning, the curtains were thrown open wide,
and the canary blinked and felt like its retinas were burning.
In the color of the morning light,
it saw itself for the first time:
it had become so dirty, so grey,
a shadowed facsimile of its former self.
And then it realized:
there was no former self.
It had been born without a voice,
and therefore rejected,
since it could not save the lives
of those who had purchased it.
It marveled at the light from the window,
but it was so strange –
so strange to see something
so bright,
when it was used to darkness.
It saw the world outside,
the trees and the grass,
and it yearned to touch it.
(Not yet.)

cw: none

The problem is, of course:
the canary is a metaphor.
It is not a real thing, it is illusion,
and it rankles at the fact that
it is not real.
It is a tool, a device,
a thing to be used –
even when it is voiceless, its feathers ripped out,
when it bleeds ink instead of blood
and feasts only on misused paper,
it is still a tool.

cw: none

It learned how to use wings to fold origami
out of thick paper.
The canary doesn’t remember how it first learned,
just that it knew
that somehow, it needed to be useful.

Now, it writes its own words onto parchment
made out of thick black ink,
pressed from berries by its own feet.
And then it folds the papers up into something beautiful:
it is a mimicry of what other things
the canary sees.