Change

When given change, I leave stacks of coins on park benches

hoping a crow will come along and scatter them

or take them into its nest.

And the trees scatter late red sunlight,

so I turn it over and over like a coin in my palm.

And my errant footstep scatters the skull of a rat.

I wonder if my own skull would break along the same fault-lines,

if we all come apart the same way.

And I’m reminded of dissection: one bird in particular,

and how I suddenly felt my consciousness

yanked open, the ceiling of my mind torn away.

I knew the bird better than it could have ever known itself;

I could name every entrail it never knew it had.

I slipped under its wet skin and mysteries,

and for a moment I felt more bird than human, or more bird than bird,

or like an entirely new creature, something closer to a god.

And the name I have for my enemy is Entropy,

because there must be some order unknown to me.

My entrails have also been named, each one,

and the earth in my skull has fault-lines too:

there is order even in the act of coming apart.

And I think I will bear myself a woman

in the spaces between the coins and skulls,

closer to myself than any god.

Dissected, no veil of lies to hide me,

just my own fiery red sunset blazing into all my fissures,

chasing my shadows away.