The Story of the Snake & the Flightless Bird

God, sometimes don’t you ever want to open up your top floor window and stick your head out and scream? I’d help you onto the balcony, and we’d shatter your neighbor’s flower pots so she’ll think twice about calling the cops on us during our tasteful misadventures of the later night. We’ll smoke our regretted cigarettes and let the ashes drop down to the sidewalk, that vertiginous drop that neither of us are brave or cowardly enough to take. Would you stand in the middle of the road with nothing but a late-80s boombox and dance to your mix tapes from the days of yore? Would you wax schizophrenic about the shortening of the days and rattle like a snake about the things we should be doing and the places we should be, instead of this & here & now? They call us Lost, they call us Y, they call us Mad As Hell, and don’t you sometimes want to threaten not to take it anymore, because why should you, when all that’s left of your hopes and dreams and all your wild-eyed worldly ambitions is an unmentionable degree and a box full of books half-read and dog-eared by the 2am light of library lamps? You would never settle for second best; you will be satisfied only when they speak your name with reverence and sometimes controversy, and they know it was you, you did this, left your mark, you made it, you won, and maybe not even then. Come with me to the balcony, to the precarious window ledge, where we’ll look over the rotting city like a pair of tattered sultans, and let the sour wind carry you somewhere else, away from the godforsaken years of the misbegotten twentysomething, into the future where we won’t care, where the ambition will be atrophied by wisdom and responsibility and weary practicality. Nothing will ever be this important again, my dear, and we’re wasting it all on rotten luck and blank walls and under financed wanderlust. Curl around me like you do, and hold on tight, and we’ll let them hear us howl, let them shudder at our anger, and they’ll notice, and they’ll know. I’d take you anywhere, my love, if I only had wings.