scruta

An old friend’s pet parrot,

Sid,

This cantankerous, eyeballing, cage-locked, grey-feathered fiend,

Speech mimicker, mood shifter, and small sum reckoner

Amused me most with his eating.

Chuckling at his splatters,

His vainglorious, ruffled attempts at dignity

While lacking opposeable thumbs

And the ability to make handtools (or nuclear weapons),

I watched him fling bits of seed shells,

Regurgitates of fruit skins,

Hawked up hunks of corn

Upon the newspaper thoughtfully laid out before him

To make the cesspool of his excrement and food shavings

Easier for disposal.

He, no doubt, would have termed it ”abstract expressionism”

If you said around him enough.

I, for one, have been cawing the term for many years

And frequently find myself staggering in consumptive filth:

Saliva covered mawings and the stench of sopped up sewers,

Baking on a humid October night in the northern hemisphere.

I realize rather late

My superciliousness was misguided.

Let Sid ruffle his molted mantle in pride.

These opposable thumbs have got to stretch a lot of newsprint.