Deep into the neighborhood comes a bend where some owls lurk. You’d best come along around 9 to 10 and they’ll stare you down. Screeching about nothing.
It’s a nested spot where little to no light comes in, just trees and scattered leaves on deeper tripped gutters pushing up mounds of grass, all along the center yellow strips. For years the strips weren’t there – one can wonder how many car crashes resulted.
If you come around 11 to 1 – nightwalking in a hope to recover something of the day – they’ll still wait, though silent now. Their prior screeching seems almost ethereal, almost untenable to the rest of their character. As if they awaken to some sensibility in their nocturnal afternoon.
Symbols every animal carries often seem like an answer to the world’s schematics. Where owls exist to remind you of the intestines you’ll pick at later. Their pupils dissolve all idealisms.
It feels contradictory to find fondness in owls when you think about them plucking apart the snout of a possum. It makes you wonder how, when you’re the devourer, will there be any room left for something more poised?
Well, all the barn owls around here don’t seem to need such fondness. When they perch on the stop sign and turn around so their dark eyes serve up a mirror for your own empathy sickness.
Sometimes I’d like to imagine coming to Chicago and finding another owl there. If it’d be anything, then hopefully the arctic ones, so I guess you’d need to go further. Or take Chicago with you. But you can find them in stock exchanges, can’t you?
With the arctic owl you can only wonder when you’ll share the same self-sufficiency and see-through stare. Picking at carcass in a matter-of-fact, same as waiting for eggs to hatch.
Perdition seems strange to a species seemingly sentenced to forever hunt. And dreams of utopia strangely exclude all those of the same flock; forget all the laws and the screeching begins regardless. Waiting to fatten new members and feast on such clueless or anxious notes: an Ouroburos place where empathy is the as much of a killer as the giver.
It all clicks into the same short fate.