Hope is a Thing With Feathers That Smacks Into a Window

Hope is a Thing with Feathers that Smacks Into a Window


Bob Hicok



More bird strike.
More buds on the hours soon to open into waving.
We were driving seventy yesterday
for the sake of our hair,
so it could tug on our faces
and feel part of the tapestry or whatever throw-rug
boring people say life is like.
We are boring people who thrust our arms
out of cars in the belief that flying
will notice and come to wrap us in the lift off.
More childish behavior.
More “Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals”
to feed the fires we light of our neuroses
so we can see each other across distances
of not giving a damn.
I love birds and regret my house is a weapon
somehow concealed to them in the pants of the air.
We were doing algebra then each other then cocaine
then aerobics broke out like acne
upon our thin souls and my point is
we need a better phrase than shit happens.
Elegance happens and also tap-dancing
no matter how much we ignore it
won’t go away.
For the foreseeable future, this is the sentence
of reminding each other it could be worse,
we could kiss like tacks, the horizon
could every night take one baby step backward
until wonder is erased.
All this stuff we don’t need.
Punching each other in the head we don’t need,
venerating the cadavers, this fear of transparency.
“Please look inside me” is followed by “please go away.”

Originally appearing in Issue #15 of Smartish Pace