A woman walks with a drunken ear, her forehead smeared pink, a flamingo struck with vertigo. I can’t shake her. Downtown, a final fit of love fills the gutter with pink blossoms, a hinge between our realities. Here I forget my tongue, knowing there’s only one language sensitive to the ditch, where insanity and madness dress each other in cracked paint and spent petals.

A crow rests in the bare treetop, a feather cocked on his shoulder. He babbles against it, this mispronounced syllable, as if his gurgle could convince the blood to leave the pin and the stiff tongue to soften around the sound.

Branches scratch their telegram across the black mirror pool, then vanish in the glow of a message from you. The tree line evident in an altitude shift, up and out of the canopy where life is an incessant murmur, an afterthought loaded with the buzz of broken neon.