8/27/2024 Dead Birds

It's 6 something PM. It's Glendale, California. The arid air is no longer oppressive. The sun isn't setting yet on this August afternoon, but it's away from me. I walk outside my house and on the ground 5 feet to my left from the white metal swiss cheese door slamming behind me is a dead bird. A pigeon. Wasn't there when I got here 40 minutes ago. Must've just died. Must've been one my cats. Funny, we just watched a horror movie called Dead Birds last Saturday. Every weekend we do a movie night with friends at my place and we watched this western horror movie dead birds. Flies swarms its stiff little headless grey body, feathers all around, talons sticking up toward the sky. With my feet in the air and my head on the ground, somewhere. I stand in shock, not really emotionally moved. Not really feeling the pang of emotional guilt I expected, but a logical one. Assuredly, my cat did this, and so it must be my fault. It occurs to me that nature is cruel. I call Cris over. She looks at it too. She's morbidly curious and excited unlike me, she wants to be a mortician or embalmer. I'm not curious. She looks inside its neck to see the undigested seeds, "Woah you can see the seeds in its stomach!" she says. Turning its body with rusty garden shears, ants scatter. I think of throwing it in the garbage, I tell her I'm going inside to grab a garbage bag to pick it up with. "Why don't we just bury it?" She's right. She tosses it around while I shrewdly look on as I walk towards my landlord's shed with the shovel in it. I dig a hole under the Seville orange tree in my backyard. I say toss it in, then she throws it in there nonchalantly. I expected her to gently lower it down into the grave, I don't know why that struck me as unceremonious. You didn't have to throw it in there like that. "You said toss it in", she says. I guess my verbage wasn't exactly helpful. I put the shovel away, Cristina goes inside. I came out to box with my punching bag. I start wrapping my hands and look to the sky and see a murder of crows glide overhead, westbound towards the sea. 

time escapes me

life’s a whirlwind

I can only swing with its mad rhythm

no use in fighting against it