Flight

[crow]

--note, the title should be "Fly".

Milo,

I think I get it. Here's the thesis as I understand it: freedom, and its accompanying emotional state, are available to everyone. The aesthetic is contrasts. So we get, as proofs of our freedom, images of breaking bones and the rehearsal of freedom's classic symbols. We also get a denigration if those symbols, such that birds are liars, such that, by implication, we're actually freer than birds.

Finally, there is pulsating in the work the idea that freedom is mandatory. If, for instance, the birds are right, that you *need* wings, then freedom is mandatory.

If all that's so, I would suggest the following revisions:

It is the lie of birds that you need wings;
the lie of time that gravity
brings you to the ground, presses
like a pillow against your face;
soft, unbreakable.

--sub "suffocating" for unbreakable

[Summer clouds beckon]
like cold salt-cream[. B]ut wait
[til] autumn forms
[out: as] long[,] striated runways in the sky[.]
[T]hen climb

higher than the [out: "the"] jealous, root[ed]
trees can stretch their branches,
hooked and bare[-knuckled, graspingly].
[Fly] to tower[ing cliffs],
where the sea crashes far below and mists
up in howl[ing] billows, pale blue
[like] a loose nightshirt.

Link arms and dive
upward[no "s"] [til] the sound of surf,
breaking bones on rocks,
--the sound isn't breaking bones
dissolves in white-noise static.
--white noise and static are redundant
Twist through the clouds
in their spectre-gray grave linens
--???
to where the oxygen is rare
--???
spun candy on your tongue,
--???
cast off earth-heavy thoughts,
close your eyes[,]
and fly.

--the narrative suggestion is: don't listen to birds or gravity, but jump from a cliff. Just posing it that way in case it's interesting to you.