The Varied Thrush Poem by Jonathan Andrew Perez

Song of the Varied Thrush: (n.)an exultation when a promise for a future is not fully emancipated as an aesthetic

The lilacs burst the abundant white flow and merge in the incipient
Dusk nothing here is old, but discarded refuse, checks, condoms, pill bottles from Sanitation.
High above Staten Island, a varied thrush bestows her sermon, British, ethereal, transient
Sung like buttermilk from a baby bottle fallen from stroller, left behind vouchered, evidentiary.

They call it a male-on-male violence, a fist fight among strangers, a retreat by anticipation.
Men took the river hostage, they damned the pastoral- run baby to women they have no recognition,
Of, but they flee; People mistake me for Viet-Cong among the reeds in a forest of knives.
The forest follows old men on stoops, who still see blackbirds in black oaks, pray to wives

Men got lost one August night in the vast building made of a million crags.
Pastoral: a festival to thousands of foxes and pheasants who did a deal while in a tight snag.
Someone hunted every last one of them; Men are not given the mirage of an uninhabited dusk
Behind us, men bigger than their graves, full grown running at us in the city's pastoral project husk.