Tag Archive for: birds

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Paper Cups and Paper Cuts

Love sits in folding chairs, packed trains, and idle thoughts waiting for a break in conversation

Love sneaks a poem into your pocket that is destined to become a hard pearl of dryer lint;

Love undercooks your steak and demands your praises.

Everything bleeds out;

Love paces, wandering the cracks in the hardwood floor questioning the integrity of its foundation;

Love tears a hole in your screen letting moths and birds and debris in.

Love refused to filter.

Everything bleeds in;

Love keeps you awake at night with worry. Love doesn’t care what you expect. Love waits in the dark, a hard pearl of dryer lint;

Love scribbles in your margins.

Love crosses out your keywords.

Love sends you to the printer and lets the best part fall past the bleed;

Love leaves you no options. Love doesn’t come with insurance. Love doesn’t carry a first aid kit;

Love waits for you in paper cups and paper cuts;

Love sits in the library and reads you, skipping all the dialog.

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Empty Except for Daydreams

No one ever bought me a diamond ring, though one did drive across country pulling tiger lilies out of ditches and filled his truck bed with them to be mine.

 

He opened the truck gate and those flowers glowed in the morning sun mightily. He was all salt sweat and tired from days of driving, his weary face beamed in the sun just for me. The birds were singing like they’d been waiting all night to queue up the moment. The storybook beauty of it isn’t lost on me, that morning was right out of a fairy tale.

I wish I could tell you a fairy tale ending, but we weren’t each others’ stories.

Broken hearts will cling to anyone; and my, aren’t I easy to cling to for those that are broken like that. They come to me all raw and vulnerable and I love them, I do… but I know to throw them back. Even a flawless diamond will appear dull and muted if the cut is poor.

And I threw him back, him and his flower bed, all the way back to Carolina. I wish I could tell you it was bittersweet but it’s only that way looking back… Back then nothing stuck and I didn’t want it to, my heart was scared and Teflon, cruel and non-reactive, and his heart wasn’t much better, empty except for daydreams.

Dispersion causes the white light to be separated into multiple colors

I’ve been married twice, and proposed to some times past that; Once I laid in a bed of tiger lilies and pretended for a night that I was a diamond, but I’ve never been offered anything past the daydreams of broken men. I sit with that, my weary face beaming in the sun… the light a diamond reflects is referred to as its ‘fire’ … The remaining rays of light travel into the center of the diamond and bounce off its internal walls.

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Digital Murmuration Network

We're all in this together

Starlings, like elementary particles, have their own spin and can react to other starlings’ movement in a less than a hundredth of a second. Information flows through flocks of starlings instantaneously which allows the birds to behave like fluid molecules at constant speeds.

Scientists would rather believe that starlings behave like liquid helium than that flocks possess empathetic or telepathic links. Starlings store their telepathy in the hollows of thief feathers. the smaller the wingspan the faster the bird the shorter the flight time. Thief feathers enable starlings to steal the dreams and emotional synapses of others in the flock, passing experiences back and forth. In this way starlings behave more like a writhing pile of lovers well past thinking or a sophisticated botnet army.

     Did you know that panopticon surveillance fell out of favor around the same time scientists started studying starling murmurations? It’s a strange thing to think that the ornithologists studying starlings had a hand in the design of our current mass surveillance systems. But really, it wasn’t a leap from learning how starlings share experiences to collecting our experiences over a digital murmuration network. What’s most fascinating is you see the same failings between bird scientists and the NSA, tracking of data without understanding empathy.

National Audubon Society and the National Security Agency are anagrams in their acronym forms.

But I suppose I’ve said to much, haven’t I? Anyway, that’s what I know about starlings. I hope you have a pleasant day.

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The Bitch that Breeds and Bites

He said, “I’m sorry those kids decorated the Christmas tree without you.”

He didn’t say
“I’m sorry I don’t care to know you well enough to think you might want to participate in this.”
“I’m sorry I assumed you wouldn’t care.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t think to even communicate this event.”
“I’m sorry I hurt your feelings.”
“I’m sorry I don’t know you.”

I’d like to believe this is what he meant, but can’t be sure, just making light of it. I’m not sure he understands that he was making light of it, denying himself the realness of the folly.

I try to imagine it was a purposeful slight, or that I am just not trying hard enough to understand his unspoken languages, but have given up thinking anything more ripples under the surface. This is painful to think. I am horrible.

I am the tempest that happened to him. A lust so obsessed with consuming him I didn’t check to see if he was fully awake (could’ve I even handled such a mate then). I am the monster that ten years ago ate the man that sheltered her from emotions too big to comprehend, and again the fiend that spit him out. I am the bitch that breeds and bites. So far from loyalty. I am my own wretched reality tv show.

“Mama, we saved the birds for you to hang on the tree. We know they are your favorite.”

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