I made wings out of my blood.

Iron feathers that flap to a hangman’s tune.

Tasseled veins pulsate the marrow,

with each pump my heart shrivels like a wet toe.

The Mars feathers wisp away in the stratosphere,

with a breeze that tickles a predator’s hunger.

It closes the eyes of a serpent leaking my venom

from its fangs. Diamond teeth tarred and contaminated.

The sky fades to mucus as I learn I possess the poison.

Cropdusting Chernobyl’s vices over an alien world Earth.

Desolate in the open air, not a red-eyed crow

to show its beak,

I am as lonely as I was…

when I kicked the ground and the grass stood still.

Expunged, left to saunter in thick marshes

like the three-eyed fiends who spit stardust and sing the blues,

or the foil-antennaed paratrooper watchful of government smell.

I made wings out of my blood,

hurled the scarred cirrus clouds.

I wanted you to see my eyes from afar.

See they are not dead any longer.

I wanted you to see the pupils that now are my face,

a dark closet that locks from the outside.

I might’ve banged for your spirit in the past,

but I have wings now–