Roasted Chicken

How is it that for the majority of my days I feel like the taste of chicken without any seasonings: bland. I am a bland chicken for a hours, days, weeks and months but when my thoughts wander to those I love so fervently and then to those who I can’t seem to forgive, I become a cleaved pomegranate oozing with crimson juice and seeds unfertilized. Which is my true self: the chicken or the pomegranate?

In retrospect, the last year of my life I have been roasted on a spit, brought to the table and cleaved into only identifiable parts of my whole: breasts, arms, or rather wings, legs and thighs. Seated at the table, my mother and father’s families look longingly over my roasted limbs with their greedy eyes and grapple with their fingers at the pieces they want most. Alas! My father forgot to bring out the most important extracted bodily organ, the heart. Upon seeing the small plate enter the room the relatives stop mid-chew to watch the plate gracefully be placed in the middle of the communal table. Moments pass by without a sound. My mother and father take the honorary first stab at the once stubborn heart. Like blood sausage, the heart oozes out its contents onto the white plate. Taking the hint from the hosts, the guests stab it with their steely knives and forks. Once the clamor dies down, the guests leave with a satisfactory meal and all is left in the kitchen is a five foot one inch long carcass. Like Hitler to his Jews, my parents dispose of me into a fiery oven nicknamed reality.

I have been cut, roasted and chewed out by family for what other reason than they are “concerned about me.” To them, I am a spring chicken. Naïve, clean feathered and ready to venture out of the coop but only under the supervisory eye of farmer Brown. I agree that I do not know everything. Nor do they know everything. Only a fool will say he knows all.