A bird’s chirp dusts the furniture.
My favorite vowels, their pointy shapes.
When a beak parts and the tongue jiggles.
You make me want to redo evolution’s cleft between us,
trade this sac of organs and their secretive secretions
for hollow, brittle bones and hunter’s eyes.
Vomit breakfast to the babes.
Pecking order, what learning curve?
Some symphony for hello has stamped itself inside your throat.
Different morning, same old bird story,
funny little noggin dipped in bleach.
I say bleach I must mean cornstarch, I mean
that band around your eyes
I doubt you know I admire. This morning,
just like last but a little colder, we meet
eyes again and I don’t think
you think I’m not interesting.
You eat a seed.
I chirp, or start to.
I know I’ll never get it right,
I’m stamped instead with awareness of my own
creeping death and souring stomach,
nothing so useful in a sunrise and
a chirp, a song, hello.
How do you do this every morning?
When the sun gets old and wheezing red
engulfs the Earth, none of this will have mattered,
even the eons of mycelium
eaten up and ashed.
My species’ letters are of no use
to you, would only irk your beak.
You are a popsicle. You are exactly
such a vibration on my eardrum
I have sought for years. To end
this sad existence of wishing
birds away at morning. I stand.
You dart off, and I wonder
what I saw.
The Birds: Insomnia Poem
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