When the seagull
grew bored with my
randomly tossed French fires
it went back to the trusted surf
and walked figure eights
in the incoming tide,
head darting into the water
and coming up
with something
almost every time.  

Now and then
it would look at me
as if to say,

here’s another way,

but I then would toss
a French fry
and another gull would dive
and take it.

I don’t know
that there’s a moral here
except that once I was out of fries
all the birds took to the surf
and left me to listen to their calls,
straining to hear
one note of regret there
about the fact,
sad to me and apparently me alone,
that I was no longer relevant to them.