Bird Girl

Bird girl
huddles by the gates
to the old hospital.
Tears tattoo her flush grazed cheeks
the fetor of nicotine-smoke
and beads of rancid sweat
leave her amputated
from us Office Folk
sickenedly scuttling by.
and she curls small-
a shaggy, tangled,
weather-worn beast
kicked to the curb.

And we watch,
and we stare
and we wrench our face around
and anticeptisise our eyes
with cell-phone screens
to forget the waif.

To us,
she as worthy as the pigeons,
dropping infested feathers
mushed to horrid crimson squelch
and bone-powder
beneath the great tires
of a Mercedes.
She,
who once rose
glorious as the sacred phoenix
has lost her rich and shinning
plumage armour.
Yet we see not what she could be,
Just a moldering maid with no house key.