Poems by Jakob Zaaiman on Medium

Vernon a Murder Car

Contemporary poetry

Not really a poem about birds (Artwork by Jakob Zaaiman).

Poems about birds and
nature and sweet sunsets
and the loveliness of love
are always so feeble and
irritating and silly and,
when the sun itself has
sunset — as it invariably
does — about absolutely
nothing worth giving a
second thought to
at all.

So the following poem, then,
is not going to be about birds,
mice, geese, pigeons, etc. It’s
going to be about something
quite other.

Now the undeniable truth
is that if a bird plops on you,
then you are a shit person. More
specifically, you have been cosmically
identified as a ‘shithead’. A pigeon once
shat a squirt of predictably white shit
on my dad’s black homburg hat — and
while he was wearing the bloody thing! —
which meant that the universe was telling
the rest of us — his family and friends
and colleagues — that my dad was
in all honesty not much more than a
splat of shit on a hat. (As if we
didn’t know that much already.)
But in a quaint way, we had now
been given a convincing
second opinion.

And I once spent a whole day
wandering about London with an
Italian girl, and towards the end of
our time together, a passing seagull
shat mightily on her arm. She said
to me ‘Look at this!’ pointing to
the shat splat on her expensive
Italian jacket. And I thought ‘this girl
is likely bad news.’ Which is
exactly what she turned out to
be. So that goddammed bombing
bird helped me dodge at least a
couple of bad shit bullets,
the way I see it.