"A busy mouth is a happy human"

Mm.
Imbibing,
smoking, toking,
yapping, smacking,
giving advice, making nice,
making out, singing out, SHOUT!,
giving head, remembering the dead,
masticating, contemplating... out loud,
screaming Marco Polo in a crowd to find
your lover blanketed in train station lighting,
finding sureness in alerting your kin to "take cover!"
in a tornado and truly believe you'll all be ok if you do,
licking anxious sweat dew off of your upper lip,
accepting that very first sip of
beer,
water,
vodka,
bloody mary,
crying out in pure elation,
praying with a congregation,
discussing the origin of our creation,
Sunday brunch mimosa after church,
baring your wretched soul to your mother,
reminding your father you're a better man,
teaching your sister's children how to speak up...

But there is nothing
my mouth can do
that would do justice to
that look I gave you.

Nuns take a vow of silence
Sages speak only truth

People get in more trouble
because of the slippery tongue
than any other member.

But I use it now
to give thanks
for having it.

Pigeon Vision

I am suspicious of pigeons.

The irridescence on their breast
feathers look like a projection of
bubbly blue and pink light from
one particular front-porch fountain
on the night of a party.
That light also danced on a boy's face.
Otherwise dull and quite possibly diseased,
he glowed beautiful with luster-markings.
He let me go on about my usual verbal ramble,
before he flapped his hands onto my face,
captured my cheeks between his haughty knuckles
and kissed me.
I should have been paying attention.

Pigeons make me anxious.

Where we held our feet in place
was on a rocky front porch patio.
(Well, except for my left foot, since my legs were crossed,
as it fidgeted in the tension-thick air,
bobbing nervously back and forth
like a pidgeon's chicken head, to and fro
reminding me of the rhythm of fellatio.)
The cobblestone flooring
resembled the exit of the church
in which my mother and step-father married,
pigeons flocking and feasting
on rice thrown heartily towards them
in celebration of what just
so predictibly became the stuff
of interpersonal corruption and decay.

Pigeons petrify me in fear

until I am called to "fight or flight"
by the promise,
or paranoid assumption,
that they will come too close,
infect me with their contemptible ability
to thrive in human-manipulated conditions,
in dumpsters, train stations,
parking lots and graveyards,
reminding me how we rely on
the economist, proctologist,
city planner and political scammer,
but can not trust them near our lives.

So, to be fair,
it's not that I fear pigeons.

It's those red eyes,
the color of love, lust, blood and the Devil.
the color of hot infection and scorn.
It's the wings they hardly ever use.
It's the way I wish my mother would use her wings to fly the fuck out of her marriage.
It's the way a man's face entrances with luminescence,
yet I know the light reflects off of him
just as it does off of the pigeon's breast,
and I know that must say something about
tricks of perseption versus something's true nature.

So...
Could that mean I am wrong?