The Crows

The man in the house is tormented by crows,
Nigrescent shadows that caw in inky rows.

Sitting, upright, stiff in deep wintery-dark,
his house perches, a crow on scrag rock;
bleak and quiet and lonely. A black mark
against the white, skeleton sky. All locked
up like a temple with light blinking through
cracks like negative scrawl. Solitary,
he moves in lethargy. The soup he brewed,
lies cold by the sink, made secondary
to the demented birds taking to wing.
He feels it. Creeping up now on soft feet,
he feels it before he hears it. Something,
in his closeted world, struck a strange beat.

Spilling up, like a genie from a lamp
made of yellow bone, just slow and silent
whispers of cloth on skin in the dawn damp
gloom. Blank, he feels it like a sacrament,
a distant throb, pulsing, beneath the bones,
twitching down through spindly spider fingers.
and then mounting the great, inhuman groan.
Uncoiling, broiling, to him it lingers.
He quivers, searching, he is not alone
and fear is in his thudding heart. For what
would knock, tug at his soul within its home,
Except the curse of words he’d left to rot?

So turning his face and his pen to the wind
Whispered words bled onto pale, papery skin.

28 lines.
Sonnet and Inversion.