You see them everywhere. Lurking. Scheming. Waiting. Huddled in large crowds in inconvenient places, occasionally venturing solo but generally brainlessly, aimlessly shadowing the movements of those surrounding them. Swooping from hidden perches, sprinting, swimming, hopping- limits fail to constrain them. Living in a perpetual battlefield, where anything and anyone poses as a potential target, and anything and anyone threatens as a possible predator. Yet you can hear the hum of their minds, you can see through the hollow of their ambitions. They are humans unsung antagonists.

Dramatic? Not in the slightest. Harsh? Possibly. But through their perennial passion for tormenting humans in subtle ways, they've earned every letter of such infamy. It begins as early as late ends, and lasts longer than late begins. Forget to set your alarm? No worries, they could reverse comatose with their reverberating shrieks, their rhythmic exclamations. And once you're alert, blood circulating your conscious far before planned, windows aggressively slammed shut, a frustration for nature's lack of snooze button signals your muscles to continue moving, hours before you need to, hours before you want to.

Partially driven by startle, partially driven by anger, and partially driven by a deep regret for picking the room facing the side yard's great oaks, which at the time seemed holistic and serene, but now serves as the perfect position for angling sound waves directing through your defense system, an incessant reminder of your attritional desire to reconnect with nature. Either way, you're awake. You're ridiculously awake, and your roommates and neighbors and community and local sun are restfully inanimate.

So you begin cooking breakfast, because you're wide awake and it's close-ish to morning and what else are you supposed to do? Stacking your toast, constructing nutritious models of the mental blueprints delineating sound-proofed walls, you peer out the window into the darkness of the unknown. Imagining the layout of your yard, you consider the benefits of logging- you really have always enjoyed the aesthetics of urban gardens.

After wasting more time than the morning offers, the rest of civilization eventually joins you, peacefully adjourning their slumbers to the soft whispers of subliminal tones. Your hair magnetized towards every pole away from your scalp from the shower you were too tired to take, your eyes inflamed with constrained, unspoken tears, your brain empty aside from a trapped chirping, echoing within your skull. You see your reflection through your roommate's concerned gazes, their furred brows. Gulping down extra caffeinated beverages and swiping a shaky hand through your ruffled mane, you half-heartedly mask your exhaustion and appearance.

And now it's time to face the outside world, the poorly lit darkness, hoping this face is more jovial than yours. Upon stepping through the front door, your eyes land where the enemy recently had, reluctantly perceiving the mangled mass of trash and scavengers obstructing the entire pathway. Picking up the disheveled bin, you make a mental note to deal with the rest of this garbage later.

In the exceptionally short walk from the graveyard of abused debris to the junker with wheels, the rest of the army aerially ambushes, releasing white and brown missiles, loyally tracking and bombarding their unguarded target. Your hair and skin and mouth singing a song of explicatives, you turn your back on the outside world, refacing your front door. Tripping over the garbage bin you'd just picked up, you eventually navigate back to the house- one eye on the sky, one eye on the ground, using your two hands as an extra set of eyes surveying the immediate space surrounding you.

Cleansing your body and soul of the unfortunate ordure, you wrap up a quick shower, now tired, late and only partially sanitized. This time in a full sprint to your car, hurdling the pile of abandoned trash you dive into the passenger seat, limiting exposure to the open sky. Beginning your (now mid-)morning commute, you consider why you rarely see stains of their ammunition on the ground, or on the trees themselves. Rather, they always make their ways to humans, and the places humans like to sit, and the vehicles humans like to drive. Caught up in your deep contemplation, one of the very perpetrators himself stands in the middle of the road, suddenly completely ignorant of his possession of wings or capability to move, and you swerve, an instantaneous reaction developed by a long life of abiding by morals, apparently unaffected by the months of surviving near the trees. And now you wonder if they only can use their wings for evil.

You go about the rest of your day, a slight fear adding an extra jump to each step, an extra insult to each joke. And as the best parts of your lunch are snatched the moment you shift your attention away from the picnic table, you look down on the array of vegetables you were left with, wondering, hoping, praying.

Your hair, your mind, your stomach, your heart all compromised, you fall into bed, exhausted from another day of battle in the endless war. The next before-morning, you awaken again, to the over-played songs of humans unsung antagonist.