Animals

Monkey Presses Delete

img0046_1

 

Monkey Presses Delete

Monkey loves walking behind the gorillas.
He loves to see fear in faces, tears in eyes
as the gorillas smash and grab and break down doors.

The gorillas break and enter: and when they do,
monkey simply points and gorillas do their thing:
it’s that simple …

Monkey has a code word he took from his computer course.
“Delete!” he says with delight
and the gorillas delete whatever he points to.

He loves deleting parents in front of children,
though deleting children in front of their parents
can be just as exciting.
He also loves burning other people’s books
and deleting their web pages.

The delete button excites monkey:
maneuvering the mouse tightens his scrotum
and he feels a kick like a baby’s at the bottom of his belly
as he carefully selects his victim and “Delete!”

The gorillas go into action:
ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, seventy years of existence
deleted with a gesture
and the click of an index finger pointed like a gun.

Monkey Teaches

IMG_0188.jpg

 

Monkey Teaches Sunday School on Mondays
(With apologies to Pavlov and his dogs)

Younger monkeys e-mail elder monkey
and expect an answer within two minutes.
Elder monkey drools and writes right back.

 He is turned on by the bells and
whistles of his computer.
“Woof! Woof!”
His handlers hand him a biscuit.

Elder monkey has grown to appreciate
tension and abuse:
the systematic beatings,
the shit and foul words hurled at his head.

The working conditions are overcrowded.

Elder monkey is overworked.
Yet he has managed to survive,
to stay alive and fight
what he once believed was the good fight.

Now he no longer knows:
nor does he drool anymore
when bells and whistles sound
and his handlers bait him with
an occasional, half-price biscuit.

 

In Absentia 3

 

img_0141-2

In Absentia 3

Questions

I hear her voice, delicate, distant.
I run to the sound, jump on the table
in my usual spot by her play thing,
but she isn’t there. He’s there, damn it,
talking away. I can see him, smell him,
I hate him, his other sex perfumes,
but there he is and when he stops talking,
I can hear her voice. I move to his play
thing. A shadow, I can’t make it out,
then her voice again, my whiskers stiffen,
I lean forward and sniff, but no smell,
she has no smell, and scentless, I cannot
sense her, I bristle and she calls me, calls
me by my favorite names, and mews, I mew,
but I can’t smell her, and there’s no sense
of touch … is this the hell all pussy cats
will suffer … shadows on a screen, a haunting
voice, memories shifting and dancing,
no touch, no hugs, no sense of smell …
and nothing solid … just shadows and absence?

Monkey Temple Prologue

IMG_0140.jpg

 

Monkey Temple

The monkeys appear, as if by magic.
They tumble out of windows and doorways.
They clamber through the holes in the temple’s ruined roof.
They are quiet at first.
They inspect their surroundings.
They ogle the crowd gathering for the afternoon show.
They watch the watchers watching them.
They pulsate, for no reason at all, they pulsate, then ululate,
They jump up and down and swing from the temple’s roof.
They pontificate, gesticulate, and regurgitate.
They sit and sift for fleas. They defecate and urinate.
They masticate cautiously. They castigate and fornicate.
They ruminate. They masturbate. They rush to the top of the temple
and on the uplifted faces of the crowd they ejaculate.

Monkey’s Tractatus

IMG_0186.jpg

Monkey’s Tractatus
(after a philosophical argument between
Ludvig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell)

When monkey sees a hippopotamus in the temple grounds
he knows it is grounded in fact.
We really must get rid of it!
It obediently vanishes.

There is a silence in the temple cells
broken only by the broom’s clean sweep
as insects are swept away from the footsteps of the unworthy.

Monkey sees the hippo trapped beneath a chair.
He can feel it struggling to set itself free.
Now hippo gets tangled in monkey’s hair.

Monkey will have its hide for a shield against dark thoughts,
an unbroken umbrella to guard him from this rain of teardrops.

Hippo bathes in a hip bath of crocodile tears:
Sunt rerum lacrimae.
He wallows in philosophical sorrow.

When the hippo leaves the temple,
there is a silence as the unspoken word returns,
a silence broken only by the hum of the hoover,
and the beat of a condor’s invisible wings.

Monkey Chews

 

 

 

IMG0046_1.jpg

 

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.

 

Existentialist Monkey

IMG_0181.jpg

Existentialist Monkey
(after Albert Camus and his Myth of Sisyphus)

Monkey watches Budgie tinkle the small bell hanging below
the yellow plastic mirror in which Budgie gazes in fascination
at his own reflection, nuzzling and nipping himself with his beak.

Black and white soccer balls cover the floor:
“Budgies for the Cup!”
A crimson ladder has another bell on top.
Budgie squeezes a soccer ball between beak and claws,
ascends this ladder, and pushes the ball upwards.

When he gets to the top, the ball slips slowly down.

It falls to the sandpaper floor.
Budgie descends the ladder,
takes a new grip on his soccer ball,
and steadily climbs the rungs.

Budgie is clever: he can imitate the telephone, the doorbell,
the pop of a champagne cork shooting from the bottle, the cat, the dog …
When Budgie whistles, the stupid dog leaps to his feet
and rushes, barking, to the door …

Budgie is two thirds up the ladder now. He pauses for a rest,
stretches his wings, and looks at himself in the mirror.

“There’s a pretty boy!”

“Il faut imaginer Budgie heureux.”

Wales

IMG_0182.jpg

Wales

Wales is whales to my daughter
who has only been there once on holiday,
very young, to see her grandparents,
a grim old man and a wrinkled woman.

They wrapped her in a shawl and hugged her
till she cried herself to sleep
suffocating in a straitjacket of warm Welsh wool.

So how do I explain the sheep?

They are everywhere, I say, on lawns, in gardens.

I once knew a man
whose every prize tulip was devoured by a sheep,
a single sheep who sneaked into the garden
the day he left the gate ajar.

They get everywhere, I say, everywhere.

Why, I remember five sheep
riding in a coal truck leering like tourists
travelling God knows where
bleating fiercely as they went by.

In Wales, I say, sheep are magic.

When you travel to London on the train,
just before you leave Wales
at Severn Tunnel Junction,
you must lean out the window and say
“Good morning, Mister Sheep!”

And if he looks up,
your every wish will be granted.

And look at that poster on the wall:
a hillside of white on green,
and every sheep as still as a stone,
and each white stone a roche moutonnée.

Monologue: Sun & Moon

IMG_0211.jpg

Monologue

 Mono means Monkey in Spanish. Monkey is one of the day names in the Mixtec calendar. 
Monologue, then, is Monkey, talking, perhaps to himself.

“They broke our walls,” Mono whispered, “stone by stone.
A new church they built, on the land they stole from us.
Red was its roof from a thunderstorm of blood.
The white bones of their lightning scattered us like hail.

They ripped out our tongues and commanded us to sing.
Carved mouths were ours, stuffed with grass.
Stone music forced its way through our broken teeth.

Few live now who can read the melodies of our silence.
We wait for some sage to measure our dance steps:
treading carefully, we walk on tiptoe.

A + cross  these stepping stones of time.”

 

Note: I am working on Sun and Moon. It will be ready for publication on Amazon and Kindle some time this week. Monkey Temple, Though Lovers Be Lost, Bistro, and Empress of Ireland are now available for review or purchase on Amazon and Kindle.

Moose

Moose

Who has nailed summer to its autumn cross? Sunbeams dazzle in the wind, footsteps follow, or is it a shadow’s shadow flickering its year’s end dance on a twisting path? Beneath our feet the painted leaves lie still. Bottled sunshine abandoned now in rusted flakes, who will replace them in the tree’s discarded puzzle? Footsteps crackle along the trail and, as they draw closer, our cold breath hangs a question mark on the air before us. Yesterday, the salmon danced on their tails. Lettuces went to seed and built tall pyramids up to the sky in a world all yellow with the sun and blue with the sea. Primrose and bleu céleste, this stretch of Fundy, where the islands are large black beads, threaded together by tiny strings of ducks and geese. Today, going home, a bull moose thrust his head through the windshield of a speeding car. For an instant the trees caught their breath, the air stood still and a red fox tore from the trees like a runaway leaf, so quick, so silent, a shadow across the road melting into dark woods to lie silent in the forest. I can still see the occupants of the shattered car standing by the roadside, their cell phones in their hands, punching urgent numbers. Shock had rounded their snow white lips into an O for Operator.

Very surprised (and pleased and proud) to hear this prose poem from my book Fundy Lines read on Shift, CBC, this afternoon. Here it is in a more permanent form — the written word. Thank you Shift CBC and best wishes to all.