Would you trade wisdom to fly?
Would you put down reason
To soar to the heights?
Would you leave the words and ground behind
If you could take wing a leap for the sky?

Would you drop your moral compass
To take to the ocean?
With whales and sharks and learn the music of motion
Of tides and currents, instead of weary devotion
To things and manifestations of human emotion?

Would you run like a leopard or even a hare
With furious pace and no speed to spare?
To chase or escape to kill or be spared?
Then lay with your mate in a dirt packed lair
Or with your kits in a dusty warm warren so bare
And leave the trappings we are slaves to, bravely to dare
to be fundamentally animal instead of a human, aware
Having or lacking, and seeking more than a day’s share?

Could you stop and leave all the others?
Choose plumage or fur or scales and wild colors?
Blend in or stand out, howl with your brothers?
Carried around by the nape by your mothers?
Lying in wait or hiding in cover?
Killing and living on raw flesh of another?
Feast and famine, one day to the other?

Or would you stay human and feast on cooked flesh
And vegetables grown at your beck and behest?
Would you wear your false plumage to cover your breast?
Chew on every comment as though it were a test?
Reasoning, rhyming with zeal and zest?
In a house full of things, and coins in a chest?
Wheels and widgets and wine and the rest?
Would you stay human for music and jest?
Or gods or God or spiritual quests?
Trying your hardest to be better or best?
Than what? Than whom? For what, I protest?
Are we better or worse than the lowliest pests?

Animals have harder lives but they seem to live harder
Would I trade for the lot of a bird in a barter?
I like my warm home and food in the larder.

Sometimes I can’t tell and let my mind wander.
To oceans and meadows and forests to ponder
Whether dominion has made us more dismissive than fonder.
I’d choose to be human but I’ll continue to quander
How to live every moment, not a second to squander.