bluebirds weeping

The city dreams of what bluebirds are,
Of shadows gone missing from a stained, spotlit sky.
It dreams of a ghost slipping between skyscrapers, trembling beneath the traffic lights—
A ghost building nests in the dark.
Visions of a something well in the eyes of the subway-goers, the upstanding, the watch-wearing;
Those thunderous, listless, longing things adrift in the veins of the world.
                They circulate deep beneath the rebar bones of the city;
                Beneath the clock face, the iron beams,
                And pigeons bathing in the fountain;
                Beneath the man who yells in the park, and the people who watch him.
Somewhere there are these dreams, down in the blood of it all, in the bones of it—
Down in the grit and marrow of the cracks in the sidewalk.
Somewhere there is a tremendous wanting.
Aren’t you forgetting to breathe, again?
Haven’t you seen the mourners in the subway cars?
Think of the bluebirds.

Now it is dark and I am quiet.
A muffled sea of heartbeats crests as far-off sirens, settles again to ripple idly above the dark pavement—
It is morning.
It is late.
It is early, and I am alone with the streetlights through the window. The world is breathing through me.
Now sidewalks wrap around my wrists and rainwater wells in my lungs. I cannot make a sound. It is endless;
I am small in the darkness, upside down in the infinity of a million people.
I will think of the bluebirds.