The Dark Birds: Poems

The Dark Birds: Poems

A SHATTERING JOURNEY INTO THE HUMAN CONDITION THE DARK BIRDS: Visions Of An Unwilling Witness, is a punch to the soft tissue of modern existence—a collection that asks: What if the problem isn't that you're broken, but that you're paying too much attention? Tath Ray Ashcraft writes like a man who walked through fire and came out with a sharper sense of smell. These poems carry the scent of burnt ideologies, stale coffee in sacred moments, and the iron tang of a life lived honestly enough to draw blood. ~ FOUR MOVEMENTS " THE HURRY IS A STEAL " opens with the title poem’s critique of busyness-as-virtue: "The hurry is a steal, / And the busyness, a lie. / Gift yourself a moment, friend… / Before you rush to die." Poems like "Stolen Hate" and "No Faith in Renewal" target how culture steals our righteous anger and sells it back as self-help—autopsies performed on authenticity by a surgeon still mourning the patient. " WHAT LOVING MENDS " excavates what remains after love and loss. In "The Tragedy of June," Ashcraft measures regret: "Mine to love, became mine to lose." Yet grief becomes defiant. "Grief Has Made Me Dangerous" confesses: "The loss—that hollow space— / is a hungry animal / I never knew to feed before." This is love poetry for those who've learned love is persistence—a mending that never fully closes the wound. " LAST TIME I WAS HERE " descends into memory and erasure. The title poem finds the speaker returning from a lunar existence to Earth diminished: "Everything seems much smaller now— / Such mediocre beige." "The Mirror-Man Grins" confronts mortality: "Death by installment, each another bone-white pill / Dissolved under the massive tongue of God." " WILD VERITY " finds the sacred in the stubbornly alive: a bodega cat that "knows no secrets but never fails to say hello," a winter rose "violent in her bower." The title poem captures a fleeting urban encounter: "In the wild verity, of fragile things… / One, fading flame. One, winter's wings." ~ VOICE THAT REFUSES TO SHOUT Ashcraft’s style is deceptively conversational—short, declarative, occasionally brutal: "I don't want to understand anymore— / I don't want to know how it ends." Yet this simplicity conceals density. In "The Intelligence Paragraph," he writes: "I sometimes regret my own intelligence because it took me five decades to discover feelings were the more enjoyable way to live. / But would I have figured it all out without intelligence in the first place?" FOR THOSE WHO KNOW TOO MUCH This is for you if you’ve stood in a shower thinking, "Is this it?" while washing off a photocopied day. If you’ve lost someone and found grief doesn’t follow the script—it makes you dangerous, hungry, uncomfortably alive. If you’re tired of poetry that promises healing but delivers perfume; you want the surgeon’s report, the bone saw, the scar. Ashcraft writes for "wretched godlings" who’ve traded something vital for convenience, the "meanest slave" who remembers they were once a tiger. His poems sit with you in the truth that "the living is short / And not always sweet." WHY IT MATTERS In an era of infinite content and vanishing substance, THE DARK BIRDS performs a radical act: it slows time down. It demands presence. As Ashcraft writes: "The quiet revolution has begun— / a flower, a poem, a nod, a son. / The days offer no greater rescue / than small blooms, growing true." To order is to reclaim your time. To read is to steal it back.