Squab

There was a carrot on the page. A carrot.
"A carrot!" "A carrot!" In pen and ink, with
no color at all, it could have been a radish.
Perfectly drawn, yet somehow perfunctory,
the thing, at once gave you the idea of a person
of superior skill who just really didn't give a damn,
but couldn't help himself in drawing a passable
vegetable. There was a parrot in a cage nearby.
"A carrot!" "A carrrrrot!" I care a lot about,
about these things.

On the lunar surface, engulfed in a sea
of synthetic cerebrospinal fluid, the brain
cabinets of the elite / remainder are kept.
Their densely en/coded identity holograms
emblazon each and every brain cabinet's
face along the shelves, and many do, of
course, present portraits, or versions in lieu
of likenesses, though, perhaps as an internal
likeness, as in how the subject sees itself, or
saw, though the distinction has no true verity,
and though there were bizarrities amid the depictions,
most are, more or less, veristic, or based on a temporal
composite. And, then there are the phrases collapsed
into glyphs, or pictures, made into noumenal, yet eminently
unreadable, words. And also, even more, subjective glyphs,
giving the expert viewer a fair idea of the mental
complexity of the individual, or lack thereof,
and many are incredible animations, while
others proffer only some simple, wry text like:

"What have we got here, then, Mr. Johnson, another
frog for the galleon?"

or: "Davy Jones... Just here in my locker..."

The parrot was a cyclops now, looking up from the page,
looking up from the cage of the page, the thin blue lines
as bars. Its lone, baleful eye, serene, and yet plentiful
in its simplicity. The icon of icons, an eye-con.

The letter, optic.

"Odd topic!" "Off topic!"

The old earth tropics. This is where the brain of Davy Jones
would begin its Odyssey. In the body of a parrot, with a humanoid
head, and with only a titanium carrot with a mind of its own,
a sentient metallic vegetable key.

"Squab the poop deck, Matey," cried the parrot on the page.
He gently erased the cyclops-parrot's beak, and replaced it,
with a noble Roman nose, and grammar, narratology, be damned!