Five Poems

by Mike Wilson

Eyes in the Sky

Birds fly in

furtive bursts, bush to bough,

robins, cardinals, sparrows, doves,

crossing paths unnaturally,

some event in bird world

I don’t see till I see

hawk

           trailing unlucky lark

                        high

                 too

         flew

who  

                                           at the wrong time,

         or the right time.

Birds relax, back to business as usual.

Death feeds only once a day.

Committee of the Living and the Dead

Fourteen of us meet at a conference table

in a room of light without walls, ceiling, or floor.

John Lennon in an olive army jacket,

grinning, sits to my right. The others, to me,

are still just outlines of jiggling ectoplasm,

but one, I think, is Webster— Webster? George?

Virginia Woolf arrives late with her mum.

I tell the group Scoot over, make some room.

Before we begin, let’s do some introductions.

I nod at John to start because who doesn’t

want to meet a Beetle? I’d be nervous, were I

chairing a meeting like this in three dimensions,

but here, consciousness spontaneously pools,

a caldron, a coven creating worlds collectively.

Fly

Aware of the sheath that carries the package

(my physical body) effortlessly

                                                    is how

to fly without lifting a foot off the ground.

Sail above tangled forests of thought,

spontaneously descend to flowering vales.

Throw the ball, follow where it lands.

See

REMS stitch

a fetish with feet and a heartbeat

in a lively land where my and I are subsumed

but then exhumed

by jonesing for the daylight state

and I wake

chained to the periodic table

believing I’m insentient dust

without a dream

Flight of the Red Bird

Tanning-bed head with the heft of a hog

tail feathers spread like a hand of canasta

struts like a peacock, pecks like a chicken

the totem of turkeys, cakewalks on Broadway

I call to my wife There’s never been a bird like

this and marvel How big the bird’s bottom, how

tiny the head, barely room for a marble-sized

brain

           Red bird stops pecking, looks at me

He gathers red feathers of rage for flight

and launches on wings of hate in a hologram

soaring above the Capital, beyond the reach

of the Constitution, a scarlet vulture singing

a song to make mobs spin around him, the 

May Pole of mayhem, enthralled and armed

for a giddy carnival ride

                                         Oh say can you see

what I see, a cobra’s head of horror rising

between America’s shoulder blades, a knife

rising and falling, rising and falling again 

in a jig danced to the tune of howling tribes

I wake in the break room at the Dollar Store

Seated across from me in a plastic chair

is the Red Bird incarnate as a Realtor

in pancake makeup selling boxes of nothing

under the hum of a cheap fluorescent light

Castled in windowless walls of cement

his button eyes never blink, and he says:                                            

The country can go to hell in a handbasket

but I won’t lose a cent

He juts his chin, presses his lips to a grin,

pulls on his red tie, waits for me to applaud

BIO: Mike Wilson’s work has appeared in many magazines and in Mike’s book, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic (Rabbit House Press). A second poetry collection (Before the Fall, Kelsay Books) and a debut novel (Food Court, Main Street Rag) are forthcoming in 2026. Mike lives in Lexington, Kentucky.