<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div dir="auto" style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><p style="color: rgb(71, 51, 31); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">Chicken Cosmology</p><p style="color: rgb(71, 51, 31); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">Neither the chicken, nor the egg,<br class="">(since you asked). What came first was<br class="">the essential emptiness, the chickenless void. <br class="">Then a beak for pecking, followed by a tongue <br class="">for tasting, a gullet for swallowing, eyes for seeing, <br class="">legs and wings for fleeing all that is not-chicken, <br class="">and an anus to excrete it. Then came the chicken brain <br class="">for dividing the world into chicken-friend and chicken-foe. <br class="">Then the humans (at once both friend and foe) <br class="">came to feed the chickens and tend the coops and collect <br class="">the eggs, and wring an occasional chicken neck. <br class="">The humans thought that they came first, but the chickens <br class="">knew that the humans were after the eggs, which were <br class="">before the chickens (which hatched from them). But also <br class="">after the chickens (that laid them). Which for humans <br class="">is a conundrum. But not for chickens, who never ponder <br class="">which came first, because every chicken knows <br class="">that she came first, since everything in a chicken’s <br class="">universe is herself, not excluding the road, (which, <br class="">since you asked) the chicken crosses <br class="">to get to her better side.</p><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>- Richard Schiffman</div></div></body></html>