Monkey Chews the Cud
(after Octavio Paz, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stéphane Mallarmé)
Brilliant in his rising, a new sun shines on monkey’s world,
dispersing darkness, fragmenting it into shadows.
Sunshine and shadow: heads and tails of an age old
combination sealed back-to-back on the self-same coin.
¿Cara o cruz? Heads or tails? Sunshine or shadow?
Solombra, perhaps? Or is it just the act of perception,
as Wittgenstein would have us believe, and nothing more:
the metal always spinning on its milled edge, never falling,
the coin on its axis, a new day with its potential,
sunshine or shadow, thrown dice still skittering,
a new world imperceptibly poised in its own making?
Monkey scratches his head. Such enormous depths
are not for him to plumb, this early in the morning.
Better by far the banana peeled, the fresh skin thrown
away for someone else to slip on, and monkey
sitting there in silence, chewing his morning cud.
rogermoorepoet 
Love this, and so true. I can never understand why people don’t want to discuss Proust and Nietzsche at breakfast but they don’t.
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I guess I live in a strange household: you would fit right in Mr. Cake. We’re doing Carl Jung tomorrow!
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Ah Jung all that animus
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Solumbra! I love it! In my Equiinox limerick last week I used the term solar terminator which refers to that precise point where day turns to night in the turn of the globe. Two exact halves at the time of equinox. Daylight or shadow, what can we see, what is shadowed. I’ve been thinking too deeply about this existential stuff lately. My brain is starting to hurt! I feel like Monkey some mornings!
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Everybody feels like Monkey some mornings! These are his existentialist poems … he has others, as you will see. Did you get my e-mail? E-mail me back if you did. There were some questions.
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Right! Will do! Internet is glitchy at the vacation house. And of course I’m not checking in as regularly as I would normally anyway!
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Love it, Roger. Monkey scratches his head. Such enormous depths
are not for him to plumb, this early in the morning.
I have had mornings like that…Lol
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Had one myself this morning, Tanya. Went to bed late last night after the VP debate and got up at 4:00 am to get Clare to the early flight for Thanksgiving in Ottawa. I’m paying for it now. I’ll post the first poem from my new series In Absentia. It’s still very rough, barely 24 hours old. There are more on the way. Solombra, incidentally, is sol (sun) plus ombra (shade) to give a new word: sunshine-and-shade, the exact point where light and dark meet and each is the other. The metal spinning on its edge is from Mallarmé: “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” a throw of the dice will never eliminate chance. The same with the toss of a coin if it spins on its edge at the junction of sun-and-shade and never falls with one side up. Oh dear: a monkey’s life is so intellectually exhausting!
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Lol…Excellent imagery there! I didn’t watch the debate…my mind has worked its way to political numbness. I am officially in “tune-out” mode…
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I was rather turned off by both VP candidates. To think either is just a bullet or an illness away from the presidency of the greatest power on earth … it leaves me speechless, like monkey, just chewing the cud.
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My vote this year is solely based on what happens in the Federal Court system. I wonder if, instead of televised debates, we went to some kind of a dueling speech with Q&A and pushed it via radio instead of TV if we would get better content out of these candidates? It is such a circus…
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The Guardian is doing a fact- check on everything said by both sides. Fascinating. You can catch them here: Http:guardian.co.uk There are a lot of porkies (Pork pies = lies = Cockney rhyming slang).
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I’ll check it out. My children asked me if there is such a thing as an “honest politician”…I think that notion has become an oxymoron…Lol (then they asked what an oxymoron was…😊)
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An ox-y-moron might be a political candidate running for high office. Oh dear!
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Lol
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