I saw a contemplative birdie
sitting on a tree.
He twitched his beak from side to side
and whispered this to me:
"Why can't you just be happy,
oh you humans of the world?
Just look at me, I'm only free,
and lovely to behold.
I sit each day on a different branch,
in a slightly different light,
but despite the frisky, fickle winds,
I love my little life.
I don't know when I'll eat again,
and I know I'm not terribly smart,
and to be sure, I'm not the prettiest of them,
but I do have a rather sweet heart.
I'm brown, and dumpy, and quite a bit small,
and my beak is nothing to boast about,
but I can sing a song you won't have heard of before,
sung in words that you probably don't know about.
I've been many places,
in my round-about way,
up Hillhouse, down Broadway -
an avenue a day.
I see all you humans,
with your sad, somber faces,
just traipsing on by,
just occupying spaces.
You don't seem to live!
It's tragic to see:
you have such powerful feet,
so many places you could be!
If you'd only look up, and sideways, and down,
not inwards, and forwards, and frown, frown, frown, frown.
I wish I were you, sometimes, when I'm lonely,
when my existential soul starts to think I'm just homely,
a soggy member of society, dull and un-plumed,
boring and meaningless and eternally doomed
to a mundane persistence in life, as it were,
a life far too short for a phil'sophical bird.
But then I say to myself:
at least I'm not like them.
They're so very beautiful -
but they have no friends!
They don't seem to talk, at least not with their eyes.
They've never conversed with the white horse of the skies.
They've never been privy to the earthwormy rumble
that the grass belts out when its crispy blades crumble.
They've never made sense of the universe at all!
Huh.
They think its just gravity that makes all things fall.
Little do they know, there's so, so much more."
