Dicky Birds
You probably started the same way – two little Dicky Birds extended over the keys, striking down onto a letter after an eye snags onto it. In my case there was the satisfying snap of the electric typewriter, but I had to go extra slow because an error meant starting again from scratch. Not an issue for poets but a bugger for wannabe Tolstoys. Then, by their own seeming volition, the fingers got a little bit faster. The circling became a jittery pause before the strike of the key and then it became hopscotch – two fingers leaping from square to square, or note-to-note like the Chopsticks scene in Big.
Then the other fingers started to join in, the middles and then the rings. The ends up claiming exclusive rights to the space bar. It was still jittery, with little pauses here and there as the QWERTY topography didn’t yet live in the memory. That came later, when they eye tired of flicking from the screen to the keys and back again. So those two little Dickey Birds nested down on the F and J keys and the other fingers crept in to learn their jurisdictions. For the slightest of moments it was like those first days with the electric typewriter, the hesitations and complete halts, but this time there was no sheet of paper to ball up and toss and the mistakes could use up all the pixels they wanted before something clicked and each familiar word became a kind of dance and the individual letters became a kind of background code, rendered invisible behind a slick use interface and if the words didn’t come then that was the whims of the muse or the poor beleaguered brain for the fingers could dance to whichever tune was fed to them. They spoke as well as the mouth could, sometimes better.
Bird Brains
When I was at art college I found out that one of my lecturers only made paintings of pigeons, which I was incredulous about becauseI was young and stupid. The only other person I knoew of at the time who loved pigeons was Mike Tyson. Pigeons catch a lot of flack wich is fair enough considering the flack that we catch off them. The rate at which their crap is part of our day to day life staining our structures and pattering onto our heads. The same could be said of seagulls but they command a grudging respect from the ferocity of their raidsa on al fresco diners. But the pigeon simply converge about the crumbs we drop about our feet where they scan the stained concrete for specs of sustenance before dashing for the occasional lobbed crust. It could be the contrast between the laser focus on each cobble and slab about their feet and their peripheral hair trigger to take flight for a few yards before the allure of further specks and scraps bring them back down. But if they stay on the wing they attain a sudden state of grace, with those outdoor tables and plazas shrinking to a grey blur as their focus is now sky-wide and their plump bodies swoop and glide with no threats from above or below bar the occasional metal geese whose shadows might cross from above. But we never see them life this, we only see them in a worlds that renders them stupid, like the birds we bred the flight from so we can steal their eggs and fatten their breasts. Our world.
Dead Birds
Remember that thumb that found it’s vocation by smashing the space bar, thumping back the percussion of negative space? It got another job, a bigger job. It became the digit that lightly pressed against the bottom of a sheet of glass to fligh upwards, summoning new thing after new thing, , where it could also register its desires by jabbing on any summoned item that caused a little spark in the place behind the eyes where all those words happen. The brain was like a pigeon that didn’t have to inspeuct the paving slabs beneath dining tables. It could stand before a constant landslide of crumbs and the thumb was the beak that kept darting into it. Schopenhauer spoke of the need for information eclipsing the need for insight, but even then, the room that one sits in is a plethora of information and the world beyond that room, even more so. Much like the paving slabs that become a slight grey blur when it is in its true element, the six inch sheet of glass is also capable of becoming something immense, but only by diminishing the mind that seeks its immensity. There are billionaires that belive you can upload your soul into this rectangular world and so they began the the work of making their souls more rectangular. The pigeon in flight has not thoughts of immortality or its opposite. Its grace comes from the sky that speaks through it.
I think this is my first lyric essay in a while, not quite a prose poem and definitely not a critical essay. We think with images and sounds and these images and sounds aren’t always words and images and sounds can have their own nonverbal logic. I think I’ve always been this kind of thinker. My early poetry definitely comes from me being a failed filmmaker in my early 20s.