You are the lifeless grackle crowding the telephone lines.

You fly in large flocks with your
smooth, slick, shiny feathers,
the color of an oil spill seeping into the ocean.
Your eyes are as yellow as a kindergartner's paint,
sickly and beady, always hard, always angry.

In true form of the grackle,
you cackle and screech for attention,
begging for the trash and scraps of strangers, unaware
that your voice is drowned out by the squabbles of others, and never heard.
Were we to listen for you, all we would hear
is a cacophony of discord.

In my mind, you are a shallow pond,
reflecting images of what I don't see:
bent over flowers, withered from the summer's merciless heat,
naked trees shivering in the acerbic winter, branches crying crystal tears while
lost pens are slowly forgotten in cobwebbed corners,
silently collecting dust.

Maybe you should leave your flock and feathers,
and instead do what nature tells you to and *adapt*.