Welcome to Birdie's Nest!

Here's some of my newest work

Urban Beauty

Its been dubbed "The City Beautiful".
For any city, the moniker is misnomer.
Did Bramante shape for Saint Peter, a brutalist basilica?
Did Michelangelo paint ticker tape
and pantsuits upon the Sistine rafters?
How, concrete jungle, ill for biodiversity,
do you claim congruence to the Amazon,
instead of commercial apple orchard?

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Stump

An oak stump upon emerald windswept field
Long ago did the tree fall and perish,
Yet, here celebrated by skyscraping fungus.
This fairy circle no doubt houses joyous smurfs.
Who, with boundless glee, exhort plentiful,
Nay, infinite nutrient from fine wood corpse.
But, Hark! Consider the milennia spent by
Proud Redwood: One Ring, One Year,
Vainly stretching to heaven like Babel.
Oh, Icarus of knots and branches and leaves!
What selfishness! What foolishness!


Personal Failure and Captain Ahab


“...deeper the meaning of the story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned.”


I have no qualms in saying I am a sore loser; I believe everyone to some extent is. In a society where success is borne out of competition and is measurable in Dollars, simply doing something is not enough, you have to be good at it. From my birth it has been drilled into me that I have to be better than those around me in order to find that success, and that anything less is failure. That’s a small part of it, your relationships, your possessions, your earnings, all tallied by the world around you to declare you less than another. You must make an Ozymandias of yourself and force ye mighty to despair.

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Anxiety

CONTENT WARNING! Read Anyway


Anxiety

CONTENT WARNING! Read Anyway


Reflections on Power

Trips to the sky in the name of progress
Man's dream to fly converted to egress
To abandon this world, remainder an abcess
Could this even be cured, by a simple caress?

In pitch black depths lay onyx and topaz,
Proud luster affects noble kings, alas!
For what good are rubies, gleaming diamonds amassed
A mere trifle to be valued no more than brass.

Brass at least builds empires, both swords and cisterns
The choice to start fires, or prevent them to burn
I look upon this planet, as it continues to turn
Eons of water and granite, Ozymandias spurned.

That oft remaked feeling, that draws family and friend
Which leaves strong hearts keeling upon reaching the end
The most potent drug lives, among the gestures we send
How cliche, love we give, perhaps the world's on the mend.


Loophole

"Write a short poem."
How to condense true feelings?
Fuck it, a Haiku.


Defending the Classics

There is a deep rot in a culture that so celebrates remaking and selling of the past purely for consumption. Corporations can, at will, deny access to an original impactful work and sell you their new hip version at a tasty markup of course. In a world where knowledge and education are under attack, who decides what is and is not valuable? If it is okay to burn some books, at what point do the conflagrators stop? The canon, Greek for measuring stick, is the standard as far as great works of art go. You will find allusions and references to all the classics which make up that celebrated "Western Canon" in everything from newspaper comics to the other great classics contained within the canonical bucket. So why should we care about the words of those long dead white men, and the words of the still living white men who worship them? Why are the classics worth defending to begin with?

To begin, what even are the classics? Academically, "the classics" refers directly to the Classical Era of Greece and Rome. This definition has been in use since the Romans themselves; a Roman studying Homer in 450AD would have been as far from Homer as us from the Roman. The word has no temporal connotation, "classicus" merely used to refer to, as it sounds, class superiority. You wouldn't dare read "proletarius" writers as a leading patrician, you would be educated to the highest standard in Ovid, Homer, Virgil, and likely several who are lost to time. Eventually, the Odyssey stopped being described as Classicus, and became A Classicus, and the classic as a noun, as an honorary title was born.

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An Oak Has 100000 Leaves

Springtime brings verdant jewels
Shooting towards the sky, arms
outstretched giving glory
to both sand and sky.
Silently breathing to not disturb
the world at large, both sleeping
and ever vigilant of friend and foe.
Emeralds of the highest order refract
grand pillars of light forming
in the negative, darker and darker
still the overlapping shadows provide
comfort. Serenity is the embrace
provided within shade, sharing the majesty
of presence with the whisper of the winds.
Lapping away like waves at a beach
removing grains one a go,
falling spinning and landing at the foot.
Ushered along by grand process,
beyond comprehension.Culmination of all
succintly summarized:
Soil Quality


Here's to 250 more years of awesomeness!!!

Gather'd round we celebrate
independence, liberty, freedom
The liquor flowing, food so great
Grilled dogs and burgers feed them
The table chatters, not one quiet seat
Behold the yappers, who speak aplomb

Blonde hair, blue eyes and a sickly grin
"They don't pay taxes, they shouldn't live
Least not here, good people determinative."
Another, her daughter, with eyes sunken in,
"My boyfriends controlling, he treats me like filth,
Im such a good girlfriend, that's the curse of our ilk."
Husband now enters, frail dog follows herein,
"She's such a pain in my ass and always a chore, perhaps she'll behave if I simply hit her some more.

And the dinner is jovial, laughter and hugs
jokes about communism, the eating of bugs
Slowly it winds down, the keg empties of beer
They turn around as they're leaving
"Lets do this next year!"