The Night Messengers

The process of nocturnal migration, stumbling blind,
wary of grasslands and predators stalking.
Feelings of being stalked can cause you agoraphobia and
social anxiety, the need to hide or to exercise uncontrollably
until your body-fat dips so low, you’re fainting all over town;
fainting in lectures, in traffic, at the bar, fainting at bookstores
as your body slams into the girl with the long skirt
and the hardcover copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude
you were holding makes a purple ruin of her big toe.
She drinks gross supermarket wine for the pain;
she drinks gross supermarket wine all the time—
and eats nothing but raw hot-dogs after dark.
Feeding during the day is another advantage
nocturnal migrants have—as it is preventing potential overheating,
and you know nothing is hotter than
raw hot-dog flavored kisses in idiotically clichéd places like
the laundromat or the cemetery.
Crows and ravens don’t spend their lives in cemeteries,
they’re actually notable short-distance migrants. Yet the ancient
believed them to be minor deities, holy messengers,
traveling through spiritual realms and the ages of men.
In fact, they do migrate back and forth future and past,
delivering cosmic tidings ensconced  in velvety gloom;
they stop at your window to tell your eight-year-old self
that a food stinking drunk will stomp on your heart ten years later.
Of course you don’t listen, you are too busy cowering
pathetically under the covers.