Pardon me, while I invite you to stare at all the mouths for a while...weird teeth and double chins and lips that curl when they smile, like they're advertising orthodontics or toothpaste and the birds are reminders too. Watch them when you walk-maybe you'll see a bird drop out of nowhere, off a branch suddenly materialized and cast off into a beak first nosedive. You'll gasp, imagining a near definite disaster, gravity's grip is just so fierce, until suddenly the wings support the landing and when you see it, you smile. Because, now, you get it-we aren't birds, but goddamnit we have WINGS, we can find our glide, sure as the sunset finds it skyline, and then walking on, more discovery takes hold. Houses tucked aways, eyes unearthing them like they were never there before, except they certainly were. Just not seen. Your eyes awakened new, you may laugh with the lady passing by on the bike in your moment of close contact, and then inhale deeply the wake of her perfume that somehow reminds you of the color purple. You will come upon a delightful older man tending watchfully to his beautiful arrangement of spring blooms- hands on hips a sense of satisfaction in his stance that can only be enhanced by the admiration of a passerby. So you'll play this role and tell him "how beautiful!" and he will absolutely light up and say "how kind of you to say" and when you return to your own humble abode, sweaty and tired, you'll pause a bit more to the evening events of your neighborhood's nature channel, a plumpy cardinal will visit and as you process full body chills, you will know that all of this is just ethereal confirmation of the sublime. You will know that the line between right and wrong, masks and vaccines, all of it, will remind you that the line between good and evil is not as blurry as you feel. It's all to be found in the here and now, in the sun you squint back, in the daring to feel. That is what I invite you to see, as real.
<Notes scrawled in a journal on June 4, 2021>
