chickens and ducks

so, the one eyed chicken that i call Smarty-Britches is the only chicken that roams free outside the coop.  chickens, as with most every domesticated animal (maybe even every animal period), live to eat.  a chicken's singular purpose all day everyday:  to eat the best possible, as much as possible.  then there are, of course, the ducks with whom i do not see eye to eye on most issues.  

the duck is a rather brutish pest in comparison to the chicken and far less useful.  the chickens produce both eggs and poop, though they've been on strike with the former as of late.  the holidays, i don't know.  

now, both ducks and chickens can be imagined quite easily as dinosaurs or otherwise ancient creatures when you stand and watch how they move.  sometime and place, in a contemporary american childhood, i learned to associate strong feelings towards dinosaurs, those fierce and hulking monsters of the impossibly distant past.  i've seen at no more than two-years-old, a children being introduced to colorful, gummy-rubber replicas of these para-biblical beasts.  and i still recall, as a Christian-reared youth in the possession of dinosaur toys, the fuzzy haze, my mind trying to cope with the eons between the two references i had for distant, ancient time.  the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth versus the time when god made everything.  quite frankly i think we need a better system of relaying antiquity besides big numbers.  how is a child supposed to comprehend the significance between a thousand and a million.  'oh no, now we're talking about millions this is like a thousand thousands.  this is way, way back.'  how is anyone to comprehend significance in the immensity of what we can statistically track and quantitatively measure these days.  but back to point, chickens and ducks can easily be imagined as feathery little dinosaurs, and chickens have the jittery, precise ferocity i always so admired in the dinosaurs of my youth.

the ducks are rolly-polly punks, waddling about with their long, soft faces.  they go throwing their girth around, constantly giving Smarty-Britches the proverbial business, often pecking her for no reason.  and whenever there is food to be had, a papaya peel sends the back yard into quite a state, power dynamics blossom.  the ducks come flapping in with a wobbly synchronicity. at times like these, if the back yard were a Pixar movie starring anthropomorphized, adolescent dinosaurs, the ducks would have nasally accents and say stuff like yous guys as they jaunt through the cafeteria flipping over lunch trays and guffawing to one another.  and so i play the overwhelmingly partial administrator, keeping the ducks at bay until Smarty-Britches has eaten her fill.  

and she'll eat right out of my hand.