The afternoon sky is forever blue, me and Charlie on the ground. To the Crows in the woods across the creek, we are small. We are commoners of no interest to the gods of the Forest. And that I understand/ it doesn’t hurt my feelings. We are together in this moment, the kid and me. 8 years old plus 50 years old equals 58 years old. So collectively we are probably older than almost all the Crows except maybe the king himself. Or the queen. But who cares. King Crows and queen Crows would also likely take a moment to bow their heads in recognition of what is about to happen if they were in fact over there in the treetops with this cackling bunch today. They are probably not though. I mean, the head honcho Crows don’t waste time hollering at vultures and shit like this lot do.
Royal Crows live in hollowed out trees filled with beak-shined dimes and tiny rounded balls of breakfast sandwich aluminum foil and lost Honda keys and small plastic Civil War soldiers aiming muskets with ridiculously bent barrels curving towards their own knees.
The main Crows/ the god Crows/ they grow fantastically enormous on the half-eaten doughnuts and fat wads of Italian hoagie that the peasant crows bring them, incessantly. A never-ending feed inspired by blind allegiance. Some call it real love. Some: a kind of wild patriotism. Me? I call it madness. These regular Crows grow these god Crows fat like foie gras geese and then fatter still, until the once fit bird, chosen and selected by the murder to lead them, begins to grow down in tree trunk space, going blind after years in the utter darkness, until the day comes when it cannot move at all. Outsized in a way that wedges it forever in the Hollow Trunk Palace, it can only stare upwards, towards where they know the High Hole to the World is, even if they can no longer witness its light/ its wonder and promise. They look at it/ no longer seeing it/ and they are angry inside at what the urge for power has done to them. It’s understandable. I mean, fuck.
Fat and immobile and completely dependent on their immensely loyal subjects for survival/ they long to hear the voices of the sleek and the moving and the beautiful when they return from their hunts and perch steadily on the crest of the High Hole to the World.
“A humblest beak of fallen salt popcorn for My Lord!,” announces the Watch Crow as the the Hunter Crow lets it drop down into The Supreme Dark.
“A humblest beak of fresh river water for My Lady!”
“A humblest gift of coins for My Lord!”
“A humblest gift of a Michelob bottle cap for My Lady!”
And the shit rains down on their fat heads and they shout out new orders, licking at the drink/ lapping at the food/ being buried, slowly but surely, under the growing weight of these gifts from a land they still rule but will never see again.
Anyways, me and Charlie don’t care. Why would we?
Fuck everyone else. Fuck the Crows. Fuck the government. Fuck the churches and the ice cream trucks and the armies halfway across the world pouring lead into each other’s soft skin. Fuck the cowboys in their pickup trucks tailgating me down the valley road because they are so angry at the universe because of the size of their baby wangs. Fuck the police. Fuck the frozen pizza people. Fuck the doctors and fuck their rude-ass ways. And fuck the pro football players and also the college football players, too.
Fuck college football.
For real.
I mean, the dream is short.
And there is no room in the dream for all this Penn State traffic on Saturday mornings around here.
Fuck your giant overstocked Coors Lite White Claw sausage hibachi weirdo Nittany Lion cult RV.
Drop it in your ass.
Drop it from a Good Crow’s beak/ drop it down into the hollow darkness of your margarita buzz Gameday tree trunk/ drop it like it’s hot/ 5 tons of long tall Winnebago crashing down onto you fat trapped bastards/ 100,000 people cheering at once as they watch you swallow an entire RV like it was a gummy worm on a bright cheery tailgate morning when the world was lying, quite obviously, to itself.
Fuck all this pageantry.
College football.
My god.
We are all dying as we speak.
You know what I mean?
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