The Man Who Had Bird Knees
I once knew a man…
Who had knees…
That bent backwards, like a bird’s…
And this man…
Could only walk…
Like a limping, lame old duck.
The children all laughed…
And pointed at him…
When he passed them in the park…
And it made him smile…
And laugh to himself…
That his handicap made them happy.
Every single night…
He oiled his weary knees…
And tried to fight the pain…
And every single day…
He used his silly legs…
To do the Chicken Dance for kids.
And then there came a day…
When the bird legs came no more…
To be noticed by kids at the park…
And the parents all learned…
That the poor man had died…
And the whole world brought him flowers.
The next day in Heaven…
St. Peter saw a man…
Whose knees bent backwards like a bird’s…
And all of Heaven laughed…
As he did the Chicken Dance…
While angels clapped in Heaven.
The thing I find to be most witlessly true about both poetry and life is that things can be funny, and make you laugh, and at the same time make you cry on the inside. Humor is hard to write because it can be both happy and sad at the same exact moment. How do you define that quality? The bitter-sweet nature of nature? That’s saying it in a way that is both contradictory and odd. It can give you a wry smile at the same moment it both confounds and confuses you. So better just to shrug your shoulders and tell yourself you know it when you see it… and this either is or isn’t it. Sorry if I made you think too hard, cause I know that sometimes thinking hurts.
Mickey at the Wishing Well of Souls
I found a country well, and I thought I had a quarter,
But I fished in pockets hard, and found nothing for the warter,
And since I had to warp a line to make the poem rhyme,
I figured I would just look in, because I had the time.
I looked into the warty water which sat there still and deep,
And could not see the bottom, and I began to weep.
The water was clear and dark and black,
And the only thing I saw… was Mickey looking back.
And nothing of the wishing well, its magic could I see,
For only there just staring back, the secret thing was me.
I apologize for inflicting poetry on you when you probably came here looking for goofy stuff to laugh at. But my poetry is just like all my word-mangling and picture-crayoning. It tends to be goofy and weird and walking a tightrope over a shark tank between chuckle-inducing and tear-jerking. You probably can’t even tell which is the poetry and which are the burbled brain-farts of commentary that pad this thing out to five hundred words. Four hundred and ninety six, actually.
Sincerest Apologizes, Mr. Mohamed
This picture is from Ahmed’s sister’s cell phone… I think.
Dear Ahmed Mohamed,
I am sorry that Texas is what it is. Land of the big white lie and home of the brave-if-you-don’t-confront-them-with-people-they-don’t-understand sort of cowboys. I am a veteran Texas teacher with a lot of English as a Second Language teaching experience. I am quite familiar with kids like you. You built something wonderful that worked and showed off your electrical engineering skills and your future promise as an inventor. It was a clock. And you wanted to show it to your engineering teacher… which you did. And he was impressed. But he told you not to show it to your other teachers for a very good reason. Some of them are white people. Some of them are Texas conservatives. And you had no way of knowing how they would see a Muslim kid with a strange wired-up device in his back pack. The rest of the world does not look at such things with the fearful eyes of a cowboy conservative, or automatically make the assumptions that were made. You see, these people love guns and shooting stuff with a deep abiding passion that they really can’t believe other people don’t share. It is an unfortunate feature of being a cowboy conservative that they are addicted to Bubba-thinking.
In case you forgot about what actually happened I have included some YouTube videos to refresh your memory.
Bubba-thinking allows cowboy conservatives to convince themselves that the solution to violence in schools and terrorist threats is a “good-guy with a gun”. They think that some clear-thinking hero-type (white guy) can make a correct assessment of a possible threat in a split second, and quickly react, taking out the threat with a well-placed shot that would never miss the intended target and do damage somewhere else, thus rendering the “bad-guy” (usually brown or black) sincerely executed without the need for an expensive trial that might only have let him walk away from his crime, or intended crime, a free but wiser (also living) man. Bubbas believe with the fervor of religion that “bad-guys” need to get what’s coming to them.
So, this is why they arrested you. To prevent you from killing innocent school children with your clock which might’ve somehow turned out to be a bomb, because you are from the same part of the world as those evil, icky ISIS guys that cut people’s heads off. They suspended you from school because, even though no bomb squad was called to diffuse your clock, and they soon learned that it was only a homemade clock, they were convinced that you were trying to scare people and become famous with a hoax bomb, the law they actually invoked to cover up their mistreatment of you.
I hope you are happy in your new school. I hope you appreciate that you have the last laugh in all of this because the notoriety and viral Facebook fame you have achieved will open more doors for you and take you to places far beyond the simple teacher’s approval you were seeking for your inventive talents. And I hope in your new school you will have fewer encounters with the Bubba-thinking of some Texas teachers.
Sincerely and with apologies,
Mickey
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