Featherhead
Featherhead
by matt ronquillo
I’ve spent my whole life building a vehicle to launch myself into space with,
but I’ll probably flame out,
crashing into river rocks, grating into gravel with a serrated thunder clap,
spitting a thirty-two-batch enamel coated bullet tooth parade.
End up a corpse in someone’s drinking water.
I wonder if they’ll feel my hollow pull
when my heart finally explodes.
If so, please ask them how I taste
and to beam the answer out into space
(by way of messenger pigeons).
I’ll make it out there one day.
Trek around some planet with insert-amount-of-multi-jointed limbs
and call for those birds
with the neon colors from my magnetic frontal lobe.
They’ll break formation, fly in a halo overhead.
Cutting skyline with bladed eyes,
I’ll hear all about what scared me dead
(before the actual impact took place)
in short, audible bursts
from each individual coo of the pigeon collective.
wow, beautiful work! so sharp &whimsical at the same time. hoorayyyyyyy!
ronquillicious
perfect.
Makes me think in terms of life/afterlife. It seems so often we lack that clarity of direction–that sensible orientation or calm wisdom that makes the best life. Even after we’ve learned so many life lessons it seems life just keeps on dishing it out–at times it feels like our attempts at life are a stab at the wind or “building a vehicle to launch myself [ourselves] into space with”. The journey into space, here in this poem, represents an arrival at clarity, peace, or even an afterlife release from life (being that the author is dead already). Lots to read into this poem. Lots of connections and tie-ins…
I appreciated how the title tied into the pigeons and even liked the use of form with the 5-lined stanzas. This surely is one of my favorite ‘Ronquilloes’–perhaps more than the famous ‘snow-globe poem’. lol.