It is a pretty dove bird, shimmering off-white that lights gently on a alley street and picks its legs to get the dust off. Its nested here before, benign and placid, its eyes are dead and barely seeing. When it isn’t hungry nor afraid nor interested, it is functionally dead, and so God has gifted it an endless cycle of tired fear and hunger.

Low to the ground as the creature is, it is able enough to brush his sight line across a tiny sprig of greenery clawing desperately from the alley floor. The dove moves on with equal indifference to a prostrate young thing that grinds his aching face into the hard ground to feel any sensation at all. A thin line of alcoholic drool holds onto the corner of his mouth and keeps him tethered to the ground. He’s lost track of all the foreign substances, his body is a shabby boiling cauldron. He thinks he might die there, in the darkness, and he almost welcomes it. For one infinite second he lets go, letting the spring of time pass by without pulling him along, and he scans his resting place with dove bird eyes and sees the dove bird. From the angle he is at he is equal to it, seeing as it sees, and he notices at it’s feet the desperate plant screaming silently for life. He takes in its need, and feels its one pounding and relentless thought of survival and preservation.

Though conscious acutely that his prostrate body is pressed against rock bottom, he feels strangely calm, free from obligation because none seem so important against his final fate. In his mind he begins to spin a lovely yarn and sings it aloud fumblingly and startles the gentle bird.

“I see a channel cut deep along my lifetime,

That guides my thinking ocean to a certain future.

And I find in that shifting sea it’s high time,

I crash into a pavement and need stitches and sutures.

Alcoholic musings travel by and form a diatribe of crimelike machinations, are the ire of my life and boss the rise of my internal ride to strife and pride and situation loss.”

Rhymed loose and raw it draws the bird out of rest and makes it to stir. The bird flies up into the clouded sky and is hit by a jet and disintegrated high beyond the sight of the individual who struggles to rise from the black pavement. The calm that envelops him draws him up equally as the dark pull of gravity pulls him down and he stands on his feet and feels his toes hit the tips of his shoes because they’re much too small. But he’s got a switchblade in his pocket and he cuts the shoes open, molding them to feel freedom again and he sees the moon in waxing gibbous.

He will walk again, and though the bird is lost it guided him there. The message of the story is that you should appreciate the birds, please.