birds & children

you talk to someone who talks to someone else who talks to someone else, and the infinitely long telephone cable that laces around our collective is where approximately infinite birds are perched too.

our children play on rooftops where any sound from below tugs at the muddy hems of their shorts, bringing them to the edge, peering over with curious eyes.

one bird has her foot on a patch where the insulation has worn off the wire. when one of us got too excited, i’m afraid, we thrust one too many watts of our phone call through the cables. she burned, spun around, and froze forever, her charred black remains hanging upside down, claws wound tight around the wire- the connection.

much like the child that peered over too far, toppling over, martyred to curiosity, eating the view, he froze on the pavement.

telephone cables are the edges of sky’s rooftop. we’re all dots on some line, waiting in some queue, en route judgement day. but while the children eat what they see, do the birds just laugh at us and leave?

how do children become critical? how do they rip ‘judgement’ from the hands of the powerful, arbitrary arbitrars of morality, and trust their own view? should we move quietly, like parents whispering their moans, fucking in the bedroom nearby? should we not make a sound while we walk under the rooftops they play on, so nothing makes them curious enough to breach our lakshman rekha? or should we be waiting below to catch them? or should they just die until they figure it out?

i think most children give up on us and pick the last route.

what of us? do we eat what we see? or do we laugh and leave? does anyone ever pick their battles? or is a battle what is fought when you have no choice but to fight it? when we want to fight it?

i think friction is a better name for connection. & my skin is a patchwork of charred birds.

maybe krishna should have just let arjuna go. would have saved us the million pages of mansplaining that followed.

lenker sings, “flight is a beautiful word.” i’m a child to some, a bird to others, but either way, my flight is all i follow, freefalling or floating.

a new friend asked me if i was religious, i said “i smoke religiously.”

god died when i was six years old, and i cried about loss. god died mourning all the beloveds that would die before me.

god didn't put up much of a fight. even she wanted to meet truth.