The Alligator-Bird

Today, coming down 169, the Kansas City skyline is the lower jaw of something we've all built. Glass and concrete teeth jutting up from sidestreets and backs of grocery stores. Love is the alligator-bird. It's not at all what you saw on the TV. He's stilted up into the clouds and dwarfing everything. Motionless. We're all watching and waiting....and then...pick, pick, pick
pick. Precise little pecks down into alleys and what not, like the tics of a second hand on an unpredictable clock. It's strange, in dreams, how something you'd never seen before has always been there. I stopped at the Broadway bridge and got out. Carl Biggs, Jr., the panhandler was standing there and I said, "Hey, what do you think of all of this?". "I think you better keep your eye on that ol' boy. That's what I do. He'll snatch you up so quick you won't know it happened. Mark, the network analyst, collapses against a wall and buries his face into his knee. He's thinking of everyone he'd ever prayed against or sinned for. Suddenly, we all looked fragile. Painfully fragile. After a while, Travis and Rose walk by, their steps as placid as a ripple in a lake, and I shout out, "Hey! What's with you? Me, Mark, and Carl were talking about how lousy this is. We're all these chunks of rotting meat for this bird to peck at. We're all ugly and fragile. This is awful!" And they just look at me like I'm ridiculous. "You're pessimism, it's just silly." "Pessimism, this is realism." But something sank as I said it. The words I thought would be stones, their skin sagged and shrieked their air out. It's strange, in dreams, how something can disappear and it was never there to begin with. The alligator-bird stood still in delicate china feathers. Painfully fragile. It broke your heart to see it paused on top of those jaws. Suddenly, we picked our words and movements carefully, and we were a "we". The towering bird pick-pick-picked and I could see it removing the things that rotted between us. The things that separated.