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You know, there are birds you can touch and birds you can’t touch.
Now, the birds you can touch, go on ahead. Touch them. They benefit from touch. It is healing to them. Their colors are brighter. They’re more active. Their birdsong is prettier and more full, and their song attracts more birds of their kind. They are faster fliers and can more easily evade predators or hunters. They are happier. They find mates more easily and have more offspring. They live their lives more freely, less hampered by the work-a-day world of birdness.
And for you, when you touch them, the same thing happens. Your color improves. Your cardiovascular fitness gets better. Empirical studies have shown that touching the birds you can touch can help lower cholesterol, prevent diabetes, and effects a 57% decrease in rates of coronary heart disease. People who touch birds are more attractive to others. They are less lonely and spend their lives living in a joy that people who don’t touch birds cannot understand, much less experience. Life expectancy for those who touch birds is 7.3 years longer than those who do not touch birds. Men who touch birds generally do not experience hair loss or ED. Menopausal symptoms are much less severe for women who touch birds than women who don’t.
What of the birds who cannot be touched? Pity them. They spend their lives struggling in vain. They long to be touched, but it is a fruitless longing that leads to despair. They can easily be identified by their pallor, their dull monochrome gray feathers, their listlessness. They generally do not sing much, and when they do it sounds of the off-key pentatonics of the Mississippi delta. They want nothing more than to be touched, as these birds are quite social- indeed, as chicks the touch of their mothers is necessary to survive- but again, their longing for such aviary contact is hopeless. They are doomed to a life of miserable isolation.
Not all hope is lost for these poor, pathetic birds, however. One can still wish them well, and in Tibet tradition holds that birds who cannot be touched go on in their next lives to be reborn as kittens in a family with many children.
Radical Totality 
This is delightful. It is a charming and mysterious allegory. I like especially the mixing in of clinical language with the main story.
Thanks Rob!
The impetus for this was the first line, which I paraphrased; it was something my father-in-law said in his delirium in the hours before he died. I wasn’t there at the time, but my wife and brother had the impression he was trying to express something profoundly important. They were speculating on what he might have meant. I just ran with it, trying to imagine what he would have said if he had lectured on the subject.
This was an exercise in automatic writing. It’s clearly my tongue-in-cheek voice and not his, but I did mean to do him honor and to give a voice to what maybe he was trying to say.
I considered altering it after the first draft, making it sound more confused as the lecture went on, but decided that wasn’t the right approach and left it largely as is.
Yes, “automatic writing,” just letting it flow out, can be very powerful. Often it doesn’t need much editing. Editing is sort of beside the point. I did only minor editing of “Checking Out,” for example. And I have another prose poem that is mostly as it came out. It’s based on a dream, so of course it’s not logical. I’ll be posting it soon.
I can’t wait to see it!