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Sippy Chicken (the plight of the drinking bird)
Sippy Chicken is me,
and he is I.
Sippy Chicken is insatiable
as if his taste buds dry
and shrivel exponentially
with each passing nanosecond.
Does he realize just how stupid he looks?
With his cheesy blue hat,
stupidly long legs –
oversized thighs and
scrawny calves,
crossed eyes, and
ugly long neck?
Bowing an eternal kowtow
to a lukewarm glass of tap –
such a pathetic sight to see.
Sippy Chicken
doesn't know how to ''work smart,
not hard.''
Sippy Chicken
doesn't realize
that a longer dip will keep his thirst at bay
and instead survives off shallow increments
that temporarily gratify his plastic tongue.
He's useless – besides sapping
away bits of water molecules every second
to quicken the process of liquid evaporation –
Sippy Chicken is a waste of space.
Perhaps we perch him
on our drinking glasses
because he makes us feel better
about our own failures.
No matter what we regret,
no matter how we think we've wasted
our mortal lives –
We know
we will never be as pitiful
as Sippy Chicken.
But is Sippy Chicken stupid
of his own free will?
Maybe he's just obsessive-compulsive.
Perhaps he thinks
that if he doesn't sip every second,
the world will explode,
and the Gods of the Underworld
will ravage the Earth.
Maybe he's a war criminal –
a modern-day Sissyphus
Serving a painfully pointless sentence –
living an eternal existence
of backbreaking meaninglessness.
Maybe dipping is his mating dance –
he has not the wings to reveal
beautiful feathers
to entice a female.
So he instead puts on an acrobat's show
of endurance and flexibility.
But what can we learn from Sippy Chicken?
Sippy Chicken is the master of moderation
He has achieved a perfect balance in life –
Never losing momentum, never slipping
off the precarious edge of a drinking glass.
He can see both himself in his reflection
and reflect upon the world around him
when he comes up for breath.
Sippy Chicken is the pinnacle of perseverance.
He has demonstrated grit and stamina
to one singular, tedious goal.
A virtue
unseen in a human race
defined by idleness and attention deficit.
Sippy Chicken opens himself
to the gentle indifference of the world –
learning to ride on the swoops of gravity
and accept the rapid tides of change.
Sippy Chicken
may seem like a directionless
imbecile. He may be a prisoner
of his own desires. He may just be
a blind, water-nosing freak of nature.
But don't judge
Sippy Chicken
because you may find fragments
of yourself — your triumphs and
your weaknesses
beneath his plastic exterior
And you may very well
have something to learn
from the peculiar wisdom
bobbing in his head.
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This piece is a reference to the Sippy Chicken or Drinking Bird popular in old-timey cartoons. Essentially, it's just a plastic bird that dips its beak into a glass of water continuously due to its seesaw anatomy. It may seem like a stupid toy, but it can truly teach us more about ourselves if we think about it...