Delicate Necks - A Sentence.

I talk to the pigeons, I mean I was talking to them today, those matronly queens of the gutters, oh-no-they-didn’t clucking disapproval of the goings-on in their kingdoms, and I had a dream about you, no, more like a memory, do you remember the time you climbed inside of me, through the ribcage, peeling back the layers, skin, sinew, and lungs, sewing yourself inside with flax fiber and ivory needles; I never felt you more alive, dancing in my stomach and keeping time with my heart – Let’s play a game, he said, and in the paper, a headline: I’m saving my good deeds for a great sin, he said, those crows feet firmly planted in that soft, soft sand:
We’re not going anywhere – and those queens, rubies and emeralds and sapphires bleeding down their necks under mottled grey winter coats, cooing their empathy, we understand; We would like to be indifferent, but we understand – and it was heavy, my heart, I mean, when I woke up at seven, always at seven, before the alarm, and always before you, especially this time as you were dead; you died and I was annoyed: there were places to meet and people to be, I told you sternly: hurry up and rise or we’ll be late, but you were always the stubborn type, that is to say, when you set your mind to something it surely stood, so it was only at the door of our little stick house that I gathered you were [not] in the bed for a year, and down the block I remembered lying in your upturned dirt, drilling little holes with my spindly fingers, spider paths from your seeds to me, which, upon further recollection must’ve worked, because I felt your ghost growing in the space below my stomach, behind my gut, the empty room we painted white with little yellow suns – you know, they told us yellow was fine for a boy or a girl, or a turtle for that matter, they couldn’t really tell the difference though – something was wrong: I felt it rise to my throat, the ghost, I mean, and at five blocks I knew it was time and let it out, gave it up, as they say; it was born from my mouth, a howl and pain and hurt, and the pigeons, sweet cooing mothers, circling the afterbirth, nodding in empathy.