Chickens
i.
Guilt is a gift: it
keeps giving—if
you know how to receive it.
Which isn’t to suggest
justification means the end
of memories that metastasize.
Like bad blood supplying back-up
for the ugliest kinds of ailments,
otherwise afraid of a fair fight.
ii.
I still see him,
and wonder if it’s unusual
that I can recall
not only his name
(Ricky), but that precise day:
when he was the timid kid in a class
filled with followers, looking for
their leader;
when he more or less accepted
the ritual beating at recess:
a surly school of piranhas
with baby teeth, not sharp
enough to kill, but barbed
with the ill-will and indifference
fourth-grade boys embrace
as nothing less than instinct,
like feral cats tormenting birds
with broken wings, crawling
in tired circles, incapable of flight
Or fight.
I was there, of course, and if
it wasn’t me
that kicked or hit or spit,
I also did little to help him,
nurturing a congenital impulse
to observe, internalize and only
later, obsess about
things I wished I never saw.
A born writer, maybe,
but before that, a coward.
(Unable to apprehend how
heroic (ha!) it might be to try
rewriting this script, a word
actually spoken—or action
that might actually achieve
what so many scribbled lines can’t.)
Someone snatched his glasses,
calling him a name I wouldn’t
say, but had heard a time or three
directed at me. But what young boy
has never been hunted by another,
heeding a half-formed compulsion
to kill or be killed, playground style?
No lasting pain, except for the kind
that recycles itself, forever, in dreams
and regrets.
iii.
Like the day I saw chickens
one summer at a state fair—
the discord of Noah’s Ark
aligned in cages and crates,
while farmers dispensed ribbons
like volunteer gods—
and it seemed I was alone,
noticing how the bigger ones
isolated the runt, pecking at him
like a fomented, familial mob.
This was like other things
I’d seen—but couldn’t explain.
Paralyzed, even as I strained
against my lesser angels,
the impulse to…what, exactly?
Overrule Nature—theirs or mine?
No.
Imagining myself in there—amongst
all the shrieks and sawdust and shit—
scared me more than a priest describing
the heat of hell, particularly since this wasn’t
a parable, but Darwin distilled:
a primordial epiphany only science
could account for. And even then,
I already suspected a different, more profound truth.
These moments, depicting how the world really was,
were tiny eggs I’d carry, warm inside my mind, until
they broke open and woke me with their wet reminder:
I’m only human.
—
