ON THE ANALYST’S COUCH

Forgive me –
the books under the pillow weren’t weapons,
just misplaced intents.

She asks about my father
before the cigarette has finished its slow ash-fall
onto the floor.

I answer by diagram: a sign – airborne boy,
the descent, caught. How memory seeps into muscle memory.

I do not mention the basin, porcelain, speckled –
my cheek’s blood dissolving like belief
or how the table, heavy with loss,
accompanied my mother and no one else.

Do boys grow old before their fathers do?
Psychology claims I’m split:
half inheritance, half accident.
Butter-slicked. Lemon-singed.

Three nights back, halfway between pain and alcohol,
I carved myself into the past. Still sleepless, still asking:

What else do you need me to say to be believed?

Humor elbows me. Tells me:
ghost stories belong to the living.

---

FINDING A MATE

No one speaks of the wayward chick.
The discarded. The unfavored.
Not a single call from the nest.

Wind. Only that. Brief as breath.
Silence, a kind of milk.
He came feather-first.
Fact, not metaphor.
The world insists on balance –
yet we teeter.

The story turns here:
how another chick was born.
In a loosened self,
tumbling.
Sky as mirror, split open –
water climbing upward
as if summoned.

Between one bird
and its listening mate,
a pause, a pulse—
then airborne.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Shift, River And South and Flights. Latest books, Bittersweet, Subject Matters and Between Two Fires are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Rush, Writer’s Block and Trampoline.