Children of the Partridge

But let us be for awhile and understand our differences

are as vast as they are human, bashful red shame

and boldly blue and bruising, because you’ve expressed explicitly

your contempt for matrimony were it to bind

my love for Al or Tony,

and while your convictions are

in some form birthright, my ‘afflictions’ are all the same

and although cruelty has a human heart so do your alien children

hiding in houses with aching smiling faces with your predisposition

that their custom threatening condition is a devastating disease,

such an easy disease and contagious as a yawn;

their why chromosome

which is just as ordinary as we are anxious to see a day where you

recognize that you cannot brutally shock out what shocks you down to your

antiquated and abrasive core because we do not leave our homes

to disrupt and upset the foundation of yours and the countless lies

you must preach to make it through each day absolved of sin

yet so involved in ours because of starchy retort scripted questions

I never cared to ask about

and starchy product scripted people

I never asked to care about,

simply because you are all so emotionally illiterate

and severely inarticulate when it comes to regurgitating the hundreds

of worms that have been whitewashed in the gizzard of

your white feathered friend— who was more likely a partridge—

and who gave us each his feather to dip into the vats of our own

freedoms and paint a life anew, only for you to take my feather

and say it belongs to you

and the colors of your flag,

but just as you, colors fade and colors run

when there are more colors to your son

than thoughts left between us

in this one light room

in this heavenly museum

where you believe man’s amazing paved maze

should dictate paths we take;

but now my tongue has tangled me toothless

and the age old debate, like the Garden of Eden,

remains fruitless,

so while on the steps of my love you spit,

remember,

you cannot look at the sky

without looking right through it.