Bodies.

My bread was flung

To fattened ducks

Who did not care

For home-baked love

With its open grains

And lumpen inelegance: ’twas

Rust to water's crown,

And soon resigned

To the wide-eyed swoosh

Of glassy, gulping fish.

I am the flesh

Loosened of gluten, and

My hard-wired roofs of air

Grow out, disperse.

I long for the swallow

That saves a burning skin,

Yet time has scorned

To indifference

The vigour with which

Hands once kneaded,

Erecting halls of crumbs

Like jungles wild,

Led only by the sun.

Loaves go undevoured:

In hollows dark

Die rounded pleas to sate

Their maker, then

Seconds whisk them

Through winter bareness

To where the water quells

And dismantles.

An unmemoried beak

Stabs, detached,

At my parting frame,

And eyes will not be found,

Nor see the morbid chaos

In his mouth, a maze of veins

Which will not flee

Even as they weep and drip

Down his gullet.

They travel on

By the sticking promise

Of liquor's bliss.

Recognition wreaked, I smear

The sweat from our raucous return

Into hair, my noose,

For who am I

But bread?