Night Thoughts of a Mottled Songbird takes Second Place in the October 2017 IBPC competition

Night Thoughts of a Mottled Songbird

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2017 Kenny A. Chaffin

Dark as the inside of a dog’s stomach

and brain going a hundred miles an hour

Why can I never sleep no wonder

my songs suffer. I keep slipping off this

branch, that don’t help and I can’t help

thinking that maybe this is all just a dream

Maybe nothing is real, Maybe some kind of trick

Maybe everything I think, everything I see, every song

I hear or think I hear is really just in my own head.

Maybe nothing is real…

Maybe I’m a brain in a vat

or a computer program

or just a fragment

of underdone potato

but, but, but, but, I am

therefore I think.

I think of seeds,

will there be seeds tomorrow

will the sun rise as it always does

will there be rain will I fly

through the air

tree to tree

twittering my song

hearing friends songs

or will they

be in my head

in the vat, in the lab

in the computer

Or is it real

I must stop

this

must sleep

must sing

tomorrow

stop the

monkey mind

and rest

Why do I keep slipping

off this branch, did some

fool pig-grease it, should

move to another branch

or is the grease on my feet

or in my mind

Will I slip from that

branch too

How can I sleep

How can I rest

slipping like this

Why me – is it because

I’m mottled – is it

my brain – is it me --

is it everyone could it

be the theory of bird mind

or just pig-grease inside a

black dog’s stomach vat

Please!

God of Birds!

Let me sleep

Let me rest

Let me sing

Kenny A. Chaffin – 8/30/2017

Second Place in October 2017 IBPC - Judge's Comments:

This is very clever. So many of us are plagued with sleep deprivation, yet who but the author of this piece has (perhaps while suffering his/her own bout of insomnia) bothered to wonder if other creatures lie or sit awake all night, puzzling over their own dilemmas and conundrums, slipping off their perches until dawn. Reading this, I could see the bird tilting his head one way and the other, puzzling over how it is with him. It’s so fully informed with humor that it almost becomes a vaudeville routine, or one of those old Heckle and Jeckyl cartoons about the two interminably squabbling magpies tapping off cigar ash and speaking out of the sides of their beaks. Except now both magpies are inside one bird’s head, making him tilt one way and then another in a dialogue worthy of Sam Beckett. These are matters of considerable personal importance to me, since I suffer from both obstructive sleep apneas and late-onset narcolepsy (surely the most surreal of afflictions), but they are of general importance as well. If songs and dreams emanate from the same place, as well they might, how are we to arrive at the former without access to the latter? This poem deserves to have its own Saturday morning kid's show. --Michael Larrain