A Dead Bird

A dead bird with stuck-together feathers

Dusty claws on scaly black legs clutching at the air

This dead bird weighing almost nothing

Rotted on the side where she’d been laying

A dead bird with her broken beak askew

Oddly not easily fleeing at a dog’s snuffling approach

Her eye open but glazed and empty of all its living luster

This dead bird in a grocery bag gliding toward a dumpster

A dead bird that children still cannot ever touch

Feathers no longer iridescent when pressed into the earth

The crows came quickly and spoke over top her broken body

This dead bird whose calls no one could remember

A dead bird lying down in the grass unlike any others

Surrounded by a loss of feathers amidst her snow-like down

This dead bird with a silent mate perched in some nearby tree

Lets the cold fall rain drench right through her tiny bones

A dead bird smudged and dirty like she never was before

Wing cocked up, down there in that little ditch

Floating with the runoff draining from the road

This dead bird that I see again as I lay close to sleeping

Waving Goodbye To Their Future

Every day they seem to slip just a little bit further out of our grasp

Their color isn’t good and it’s almost like they no longer care

They’re even less aware than our dear children - whom they cannot recognize

But at some point they gotta realize we got lives of our own to live

Lots of us are saying they’ll just have to be able to take care of themselves

Life must go on for we the living, so we’ll just have to let them go

It’s not like we don’t got our own futures covered, what with christ and all

So we’ll just take a moment to wave goodbye from amidst our noisy fortunes

After all, we are, one and all, in this competition called the pursuit of happiness

Their far-off signals are pretty much indecipherable along our hurried way

So we’ll see them off and wish them well on whatever road that they may find

We cannot sacrifice our very lives providing for all their needs forever

They do not seem to grasp the vitally important nature of our feverish pursuits

They cannot share the passions which consume us to the exclusion of all else

Their silent presence can become oppressive when we have so much to do

We all must learn we just have to let them go - even if they might not go away

They cannot realize the immense burden their simple presence generates

In any case, how can they expect their milk without fighting for a teat

Their passive and unwavering silence cannot fail to hurt their cause

Because the earth’s sweet goods get divvied up to whomever grabs the most

But every day our own needs seem greater and their voices grow even fainter

So we leave them on an ice floe or cast them into the river in tiny fragile boats

We borrow a moment to wave goodbye and then hurry back upon our noisy way

We grant them their freedom and independence, out of sight and out of mind

We absolve ourselves of knowledge, responsibility and any guilt on their behalf

We wish them well and wave goodbye and promise we’ll meet again, somewhere up in heaven

So we set the children of the future free that we might get on with our own pressing lives

We forever turn our backs on them for we have determined to have it all today

I'm Higher Than Mommie

I’m sipping right along now with Mommie thru my little navel straw

Getting a real taste for her cool menthol cigarettes and that cheap lite beer

My tiny ears are pricking up hearing country music from underwater

I’d be really lightheaded if I wasn’t already floating so very freely

It’s warm and dark in here so I cant see the dirty modular where I’ll soon be living

Those piled up dirty dishes and filthy carpet do not bother me at all

Don’t know why I get all scared and nervous when my daddy gets to yelling

I’m higher than my Mommie is, cause she’s sharing everything equally with me

I can taste all the smells of the shrink-wrapped stuff down to our local Wal*Mart

The diesel exhaust from Daddy’s big old truck goes right into my fetal bloodstream

I like my coffee in the morning but it makes me weewee just like Mommie

I get my nutrients from white bread, hamburg and adulterated chinese vitamin pills

I’ll tell you what, my growing brain just loves that Crank as much as my scratchy Mommie

I knew that she was real upset when that last tooth fell out, but, hey, I aint got none, neither

Coming out real soon to crawl the welfare office floors just the same as she did

I would have cried when Daddy punched her but no one could have heard

Sometimes she feels me kicking for a little quiet, as they cackle on the couch at 4:00 AM

She takes me to work sometimes cleaning houses and I can taste the cleansers

When daddy and his friends get to shouting at the TV sports it scares me half to death

I try to roll over and hide my head, but I just have to depend totally on my Mommie

I’ve got pretty blue eyes and cute little fingers and I take in everything she does

I listen as my big sister wipes her dirty nose as it’s buried over me on Mommie’s lap

She don’t talk too well and no one knows why but she’s also short and overweight

But I’m still warm and safe and totally helpless here inside my beloved Mommie

It wasn’t much different for my Mommie or her Mommie going back a few generations

The drugs and environmental contaminants are different but our attitudes are still the same

We all started out just as perfect and as pink and as innocent as I remain right now

And I don’t know no better so my inescapable life will still be all like wondrous to me

The dingy walls that close in on her aren’t as nice as my safe place here in her tummy

She shelters me from the scabies, impetigo, bedbugs, roaches and nasty head lice

I’m picking up on TV though, cause it’s blaring through to me all the time

Sometimes when she lays wrong I don’t know it, but her obesity is squeezing me

I hear my grandma’s laughter morphing into a nicotine coughing fit just above my head

But by then my little world is spinning gently cause it’s finally time for bed

And my love is already smilingly unconditional for I am totally helpless and dependent

So, I’m higher than my Mommie is cause I’m younger, innocent and totally at her mercy

Just One More Filthy Pond

A filthy pond, exposed to the merciless sun with weeds and stickers surrounding it

Litter and household castoffs line its entire shore and fill its slimy green water

Too close to the smog-belching, constantly-roaring traffic jam called a freeway

Too easy for those criminal disposal trucks to visit late at night

A sad little pond, but well-suited to hold many empty beer cans

Sometimes a pair of dirty dish water ducks somehow still bob upon it

Too small and unimportant for us passing daily by, upon our hurried ways

Nonetheless, a good place for lost youth to go and get really blown away

Algae-filled home to a couple of mutant and air-gulping carp

Washed into by every manner of foul runoff with each and every dirty rain

Not even on our social radar given our much more pressing economic issues

As easily overlooked as the homeless misfits we gingerly step over every day

It’s care falls permanently between the cracks, just like the multi-generational poor

A lost shopping cart leans green and now only half-submerged, close onto the shore

A deformed frog with a disfiguring skin disease croaks in vain for a mate

This festering leper holding up a tiny dirty mirror to our progressive and bustling city

Not even in a bad part of town, but, nonetheless, entirely without a social safety net

Protected by a falling down fence, Poison Warnings, No Fishing and No Swimming signs

That is, not suitable for our kids or puppies, but yet, not worthwhile enough to be cared for

A filthy pond that exposes a small flaw in this whole living outside of nature campaign of ours