By Robert Herbert
Buzzard pecks the glass pane that frames outsides.
He is pretty pissed about something.
I let him in, he beaksnaps my smoking jacket.
“Say something, you stupid bird, bogle me
less at such an hour as this, the gay sun
is still to galivant this way and you
should be nesting.” He perches on the shelf
for the poetry books and squawks, livid,
stomping now like a trooper. I could kill
him, and as I guage this ill, it becomes clear,
he is comparing the vague emptiness
of my bookshelves to a totalitarian regime.
He wants me to flail freestyle for freedom,
to scorn my propaganda in a false past,
to write better poems, that maybe outlast
links I like, I post, on Facebook, about David Graeber.
Robert Herbert’s debut collection of poems entitled, Pangs! & Intermittences, is forthcoming from Knives Forks & Spoons Press. The poem presented here is an Intermittence. Other works have appeared in Stop Sharpening Your Knives 3 and 4, Kritya, Magma, Gallous, Poetry Proper, Ink Sweat and Tears, Brand, and 3am Magazine. He solicits poems for the e-zine, Digital Behemoth, see http://digitalbehemoth.tumblr.com/ He has performed his poems at Wells Poetry Next The Sea, Flatlake Literary and Arts Festival, The Poetry Library, and The Seamus Heaney Centre.
The 22 Magazine 