morning song

tomorrow is today
and the great flies of morning
leap from cold window panes
and turn into slush inside frogs
in the grass, moistened by dewdrops

you can't fix it, mister cricket. it's broken and your chirping hurts my ears. but it's empty when you stop. so empty. i wish the stereo still worked.

children

such terrible things, she wept. such terrible things he did. she had the children with her she said. clean, innocuous things. yet she seemed frightened to bare them to the world, so they remained in her shadow, the shadow children. they had seen terror, smelled its rank breath on their tiny faces. but never again.
but she knew why. and the children knew because she did. because the children knew all she knew and felt long before she opened her mouth to tell them. she sometimes wondered how, but the beatings. the beatings took all wonderment out of her. so the children knew - this was the brute fact and she stopped wondering. but not before he took her tongue, teeth and eyes, which he ripped from her body and fed her one cool purple dawn. but he never struck the children. and the children knew and did nothing.
but she knew why.
the devil was in them. and she was patient.
she heard his screams as they flew at him one day. at midday. she heard the thin ripping sounds as their claws tore his skin and dug into his flesh. she heard the dull spatter of the first spurt of blood hit the wall. and she heard their chittering laughter, and it filled her with a fear as deep as her affection for them. for they were hers. they were his too, and for a moment he stood before her, his black wings covering the horizon.