bird

2009

Impressionistic cityscapes dot my hybrid eyes and the whistles of racing garbage bins crash through my mind and more than anything else what I do not want to do right now is cry

The sky is painted inside an orb of green screens and cold rotting lumber and if you stand on your tippytoes on the tallest skyscraper you easily scrape the sky and I can do that only so much until

I realize that here on my pedestal it's a long long fall to the big black bottom and the Mexican families crossing the streets past the glassy windows are just such a sad sight to see with their secondhand strollers and muddy sneakers

The grime from the ghetto creeps into the fine institutions and you can taste the disgust on the alcoholic businesswoman's face and it's just so terrible and all I have to do is touch the sky is climb to the top of that one glassy building and I can rub the paint off in strips and they fall in my hair and my eyes and make me blink

The splintered crows and clouds smear across this television screen of oblivion and my pen draws swastikas and pentagrams on the graffiti marked cities and billboards telling me how to live and I'll just stand here on my tippytoes and I'll touch the sky and bask in the knowledge that I know how to live even if sometimes I just don't feel like it

In and out they go from the gritty rundown pharmacy carrying orange bottles of opportunities to get out of that smog filled hole and make a name for themselves in the law record database of time

I just want to paint over this new sickly blue and remind the earth how it was before our culture of soup cans and water bottles and sneakers and just paint it with my fingers inch by inch until it gets too far for me to reach and I'll fall and maybe I'll stop crying

Slanted parking decks with car alarms screeching a cheap Broadway musical and don't you f*****g tell me what to do and the bricks on the sidewalk are pale and smooth like my mother's hands

Girls made of perfume and lipstick and men made of hair and suede waltz through the revolving doors and in a couple hours the sun will be at just the right angle to reflect and beam light down the paths of the giant Sysco trucks and shiny BMW's and the drivers will moan and complain and I'll just sit here and I'll laugh because it's really all so wonderful

So so wonderful when you can touch the sky