anyone for seconds

The night creaks on. Jody keeps decreasing
while lights turn off across the land, like many eyes
at long last closing. Jody loves shrinking.
Hopes there is an El Dorado somewhere,
thinks she might yet escape the kingdom of her skin:
Wait for one murky hour like the one around us
then leave, in search of some less flimsy kingdom.
And stupidly, I say I wanna go where you're going,
because something in me mutters dumbly she is right.
There is dorado, somewhere. We could race there.
Bony feet flapping, spindly shins cracking, plaits lashing our backs.
This urge to run. We understand. It cannot be ignored.
Or halted with love, or someone's dinner. She has tried
and tried, she thinks, but life has eaten her alive. So she charges,
fast toward another dawn in which she won't be swallowed whole.
And a sound in the hall now. The walls blur it. I lift my fingers.
Flex. Then listen. I think someone sobs. Another girl here maybe,
another Jody. Another girl who is Going. They all around you,
just hard to see because of them being Nearly Not Here.
Anyway, it could be a dog barking. Or both. Or neither. Anyway.
I turn again to Jody, but she is off and racing
tripping through weed-thick fields, forgetting the taste of sugar
not even knowing it. She will rush on headlong,
because that is how the game ends.
Without any proper Goodbyes. Just Jody, running,
colliding with birds that are all at once emerging
this slip of a thing and tonnes of other tiny birds
earthbound at first, then together rising.
Their scores of tiny shapes a only a blush
a dark blush climbing freely up the clean cheek of the sky