How to Defend Your Henhouse

Unspooling all my soul,
unrolling all the multicolored threads
for loosing and for layering,
allowing them to laugh and lie with me:

A shack of sunburnt lumber
warped and cracked by summer’s loathing,
containing feathers, white,
apologizing in the dust
like ticker tape confetti left
to spill across a ransacked earth
and cling to wire cages: ah, parade!
Grand old parade,
with gore and death high-stepping
at the front, while in the rear
a blood-black jungle maw
discourages all further
exploration.
There stood my pride.
Here blow the feathers.
The red beast has come
and gone.

Dead stone farmhouse
alone above a graying hill
where I cannot go in,
nor do I want again.
Within each bower live
the spirits, spirits,
requesting all my secret verse,
always grasping, sighing, asking,
moaning lurid questions
in the dust.

Myself, I am a thief,
I am a very clever thief,
and thieving games became a tit
from which I suckled sustenance.
Hidden walks
on shaded paths,
you see? Now I become
the fox that you invited in.