How I will Become a Raven

It begins.
A theatrical memorization,
fraught with tightly coiled,
inhabitable language.
We move with abstraction,
completely past.
completely present.

Context always fades.

I feel full and enveloped in wonder.
But language becomes impossible
as metaphors, once full of life,
stumble on the verge of sleep.
Temperature overrides each breath.
Lungs caught in the middle
of air, searing at mid-summer
degrees. Stopped. Paralyzed.

We all break somewhere.

At some fine line, hidden.
Where my own death has a way
of speaking. And what is born?
What might swim in my
belly like a ripening?

I memorize and perform
all the things we shared.

There are words,
even when language
is impossible. Even when
something as simple
as a grapefruit, lying on the table,
becomes a new idea.
Becomes what is born.
Lays there, unmoving, until
the ripening turns rotten,

hanging at the back of my throat.