Upon Seeing an Egret on a Telephone Line

Sister,
You aint no pigeon!
Why you spendin all that time
trying so hard to look like one?
Trying to look like something most girls
would be ashamed to be called?
Trying to look like something
that hides its face
under tattered, greasy wings
for every hour that its not
filling its gut
with birdseed
and guilt
and cigarette butts
and shame?
Why you spendin all that time
standing out on the street,
marking time
till you're standing out on street corners
standing on lines thinner than your
girlish legs.
Stradling lines between worlds
between whoredom and
"Oh, what a good little girl."
Why you spending all that time
trying to get some arbitrary amount
of grime under your wings?
As if they were marks of pride
sullying your feathers,
anxious for a spot
of color or
something to justify why
you cry everytime the sun
rises
or sets,
sister?

Why you sullying your feathers, sister?
Don't you know that
you were hatched into this lesser world clean
and pure as both
simile and metaphor for things
most people in this place have never seen
Like fresh fallen snow?
Like a peaceful, welcome death?
Like innocence?
Don't you know you are innocent?

Sister,
bobbing your head
back and forth for these
froggy fools
is a waste of your time.
There's no need for all that ocean floor talk.
If you want to cut them down,
your mouth was made
for more
graceful
thrusts than that.

Sister,
why you
wasting all that time trying
so hard
to stay so high?
When even in the lowliest fields
men will stretch their necks
to see you wading through marsh waters,
hoping you will strut for them,
hoping you will call for them.  Hoping
you will spread yourself open,
welcome them
with your wings perpetually parted,
revealing your quickly beating heart
beneath your tender breast.  And really,
you need only step lady-like
and reveal a bit of yourself
unmarred
by the knee-high mud and shit of this world
to leave them
dumbfounded.

Sister!
I know you hear me calling you, sister!
You can ignore me all you want.
Sister!  Sister!
I will never stop calling you, Sister!
I will never stop calling you
sister!