Last night I became a flock of birds on the eve of their descent.
Last night I was a murder of crows.

To be a murder of crows is to not know

              if you are magic              or dreaming,
                            a flask of ring tones              or a canvas of teachers

                            a worship of poets                or a cashbox of planets.
I did not know body or the hungering scratch for permission.

I was at once a marriage of galaxies, a shining glory of mistakes,
                                                        a lumbering storm of shoelaces,

                                                        and a cinema of head turns.
I walked like a torso of regrets heaving a crease of love letters,
               written in blue, flowing downstream.
I chose to live as a river of ripped journal pages,

                            a sprain of tears, spilling

                                          into a spectacle of wringing hands.
In the pitch, I became

a dictionary of guitars, strings taut and out of tune

I had forgotten what a migration of fingertips

                                          feels like on the landscape of the skin,

I had forgotten I am not the strings

                                          but the articulation of sound when they are played,

how forcefully we pour out of our bodies              to be formless,

                                                        how even in a foreign wrapping,

                                                                      our bodies break

                                                                                    free of the stilled silence.
Daemond Arrindell is our Poet in Residence for August. Previously: Disbelief, Costume, and Family Tree