A Little Birdy Told Me This

I’m walking down the street, trying to clear my head before bed.

It’s 2AM, and I happen to hear this crazy ass bird, lost in its own home, eerily echoing its ramblings off of the brick and concrete confusion that is the city I have just moved to.

Not the town I grew up in, but close to it.

Anyway, I keep walking, and my attention shifts.

The sweet smells of summer have begun to descend in the form of spring, 
bringing with them a hybrid nostalgic excitement.

A feeling so familiar you can close your eyes and taste it,
count the hundreds, if not thousands, of times you’ve felt it before; 
yet so fresh, so new, that, regardless of its simplicity, you become intoxicated with your lack of tolerance for its heady effects.

As far as I can remember, for me this feeling started with the anticipation of summer vacation. No school, long days, warm nights. Beaches and BBQs with cousins and neighbors. The basis for my community and culture. It has since evolved into a lusty soup of expectations and memories. Breaks from vocation, times for love creation and sexual relations.

I pass cigarette smoke and the East River, bars, and cars, and conversations I’ve heard before. I tell myself, “what a bore”, because it’s reflexive, but I ignore this cynical perspective, letting it come, then go, knowing the world is a bigger place than one Conversation on one Street in one City.

I repeat this little poem to myself a number of times, both frustrated and proud that I don’t have my phone or a pen to write it down. With each attempt to memorize it, I end up modifying it, adding meter, and rhythm, and my progressing experience of the expanding night, both forgetting and manipulating different parts, letting things develop naturally.

I continue walking, and my attention is broken. I’ve subconsciously returned to the same street I started on and that same crazy ass bird is still chirping its story for whoever will listen.

I laugh. I’ve been doing the same thing.