It flew in with the crows,
driving the other birds out.
And we, we took our place
in that space beneath their dreadful wings
where promises seemed plausible,
and where, in the dark,
we tried to keep them.

Oh, you were not bad.
And I was not either.
It was the crowness of it
that made us slip and miss.
The thing that hid us first deliciously,
then hid us from each other.

Oh, you were not bad.
And I was not either.
It was the dark,
luscious, wet, and warm,
turning into shadow there,
into murk, obscurity and gloom
that made us fumble, room to room.

Oh, you were not bad.
And I was not either.
It was, instead, the flying in of crows,
of only those.
It was the asking everything of night
with nothing for the small birds, there, to do.

Oh, we were not bad,
Just ignorant.
So, with nothing left,
tiny those, those little birds,
they pecked at our unawareness.
And taking out whole strands of it,
whole winding nests,
tiny those, those little birds,
they pecked us clean.
They pecked us perfectly apart.
The kiss of dark was not enough
without the tiny, little bits.

Erich von Hungen is a writer from San Francisco, California. His writing has appeared in The Colorado Quarterly, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Esthetic Apostle, The Write Launch, Tiny Seed Journal, and Pomme. Find him at his YouTube website: PoetryForce.