Dead Pigeon

Here’s the thing: I’m not a poet. I didn’t know it ‘til I tried be one, tried to dig out some sort of angst in my soul and describe it, dress it up as expressive sorrow and put it on a platter for everyone else to see and admire….or so I thought. Self-expression is so overrated. My so-called pledges of artistic freedom do less flying and more falling. Flat. Kaput. Like a dead pigeon in the middle of a dinner party. You’d think that’d be funny, all these fancy people chatting away and suddenly—splat! A dead bird. It isn’t funny, though. No one laughs. They just stare, at first with dull-eyed confusion, trying to comprehend the sudden intruder, and then with a mounting sense of horror. How should they react? Should they say something? Everyone knows it’s there, but they won’t dare acknowledge the lifeless fowl for fear they might be blamed for it. Instead, they pretend not to notice, letting the silence build in ever-thickening folds of asphyxiating awkwardness ‘til the sheer weight of it reduces even the social giants to mutes. Someone will finally speak and life moves on, but the pigeon never really goes away. It’s just ignored, passed over, like that awkward moment when you tell your best friend you like him and he doesn’t answer. Major dead pigeon. There’s no going back after that. You can pretend it didn’t happen, but you both know it did. You wanna die inside, crawl into the cave of your broken heart and cry, but for some reason you still strain to laugh at his jokes like everything’s fine. Why? I’ll tell you why: because of that stupid dead pigeon! Sometimes you can joke it off, find the perfect words to say so that he’s okay and you’re okay and you can bury the poor bird in peace; sometimes it works. Don’t ask me how, though. I’m not a poet.