Dreams

Run, Monkey, Run!

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Monkey Turns Down Promotion

 “I hereby appoint you head of the asylum.”
The young office monkey with the plastic stethoscope
was dressed neatly in a white sheet.

“Dr. Freud, I presume?” Monkey held out his hand
but his witticism was lost in a flood of water
flowing from the flush and over the floor.

 Monkey stood there, paddling in piddle.
Inmates with crowded heads and vacant faces,
fools grinning at a universe of folly, paddled beside him.

He wiped a sick one’s drool from his sleeve.
The office boy spat on his hands,
slicked down his hair, and placed his stethoscope
on monkey’s heaving chest.

 “You have no pulse.”

“How do you know I have no pulse?
Surely, you cannot hear my heart
for you have a banana stuck in your ear.”

“Speak up!” said the office boy, “I cannot hear you:
I have a banana stuck in my ear.”

 Then monkey felt fear.

Daylight diminished and waters closed over his head.
He spurned the proffered paw,
the life belt thrown by the offer of a new position.

Exit monkey left, pursued by a chorus:

“Run, monkey, run!”

Monkey Teaches

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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

 

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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?

In Absentia 2

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In Absentia

2

 At the Airport

 

It’s dark when we leave the car in the car park.
You unload your suitcase and wheel it away.
Dawn dawdles and you’ll see its very first spark,

high in the sky, like turkey vultures who play
with fire from old gods and return to earth,
wings aflame. People no longer kneel and pray

for fair winds and fine weather. There is a dearth
of hands conjoined in prayer. Fingers clasp books, lap
-tops, scans, photo IDs, seat choice, proof of birth …

nobody smiles, nobody laughs. It’s a crap
-shoot, really, each flight, dice rolling as to who
sits next to who(m). Can anyone tell which chap

will pull out a knife or gun and threaten to
kill someone if rough orders are disobeyed.
It wasn’t like this before: jungle law, zoo

-keepers needed to keep order, guns displayed
by security guards who look grim and show
their teeth, gritting them tight as if on parade,

as if they wanted someone to help them grade
each passenger, each situation, dogs low
-slung sniff at you when you board, and you afraid
your fear will show. Come back my love. Don’t go.

 

Monkey’s Tractatus

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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.

In Absentia 1

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In absentia

Prelude

1

 The Beaver Pond

Tomorrow, early, my love, you’ll fly away.
Today, you’ll walk round the Beaver Pond
where red and yellow leaves abound. A thin grey

webbing garlands one dead tree. I’m not too fond
of tent worms. I hate them when they swing
from low branches. Give me a fresh green frond

caught by the morning sun in early spring
or else bright autumn leaves so soon to fall.
I love American Goldfinches when they sing

that last departing song. I love most of all
those occasional visitors: do you recall that bright
blue Indigo Bunting with his “I’m-a-lost-bird call?”

The hunting hawks give everyone a fright.
They perch on top of a garden tree
then step off into space to claw-first alight

on some poor songbird trilling away, quite free
from fear, his unfinished symphony of song.
It’s getting late, my love. You walk towards me
out of the woods. I’ll end this poem with a plea:
don’t forget me … and don’t stay away too long.

Existentialist Monkey

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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.”

Limericks for Meg

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Limericks for Meg Sorick
(with many apologies)

Lying sleepless at night in my bed,
with my pillow tucked under my head,
unable to sleep
and tired of damn sheep.
I start writing limericks instead.

Now, of limericks I’m really the king.
Mine flow like a song you can sing.
I tap out the beat
with fingers and feet
and they end with a zing and a ping.

My Teddy Bear still sleeps with me.
He’s as cuddly as cuddly can be.
The hands of the clock
and their dickory-dock,
take us from two until three.

On the floor a family of mice
think our bed is warm, comfy, and nice.
I must watch what I say
because they won’t go away:
if I speak they’ll be in in a trice.

My cat sits quite still on the mat
then says “I think I smell a rat!
Go get your gun!
Hurry now! Run?
I bet it’s a big one, and fat.”

A rat, that’s what she said.
I hastily got out of bed,
ran down stairs
saying multiple prayers,
and tripped, and fell on my head.

I got back to my feet in some pain,
went up to the bedroom again
Teddy Bear, mice and cat,
were tucked in, fancy that,
and snoring away like a train.

I decided to sit on a chair
and pretend they just were not there.
I picked up my pen,
wrote limericks again,
and started to tear at my hair.

My inspiration now was all wrong.
Rhyme, rhythm, and wit had all gone.
The hands of the clock
sang tickety-tock
as the dawn came creeping along.

Now here comes the end of my story,
I’m afraid it’s a little bit gory.
I beat on that bed
till the wild-life was dead
and I’d covered myself in false glory.

You can see from my limericks, Meg,
how they all show a fine turn of leg,
with neat little feet,
a strong rhythmic beat,
all borrowed and ripped off a peg.

The End

 

Monkey’s Book Burning

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Monkey’s Book Burning

(Remembering Cervantes’s Scrutiny of the Library
and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451)

Who burnt Monkey’s books?
Who took them from their shelves,
evicted them into the courtyard,
built them into book stacks, like hay,
then applied gasoline, and a lighted match?

Monkey watches in horror as smoke
and flame devour his beloveds.
He tries to approach, but the fire is too hot.
One book jumps out from the smoke,
still smoldering, and monkey
snatches it and carries it away beneath his coat,
the fire burn branded into its cover,
the skin still sizzling on monkey’s hand.

How many books were burned that day?
How many monkeys now walk in the woods,
trying to re-create their lives, circulating
their memories by word of mouth?

Moth is to candle as book is to flame.
Monkey runs his hand in and out of the candle.
He recalls the bonfires in other, far off streets
and coughs through the throat burn of smoke
as he touches the blistered scars of flame.

Monkey Watch

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Monkey Watch
(after Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Bertrand Russell and the Myth of Icarus)

Monkey senses things that are invisible
to other minds. He knows that ink in a pen
can run dry, that word flows can suddenly cease,
that mechanical pencils can so easily
break down into their component parts.

New Year’s resolutions can lie broken on the gym
-nasium’s floor. Scattered on the ground, they lie
shattered, tattered like the beribboned tresses of trees,
blown blind by winter’s feverish, age old wind.

Time has grown feathers and traced
its moth flight round the candle flame.
These solar spots that beautify the moonscape wings
of the meandering moth are too hot to handle.

Suddenly, there is the scent of burning flesh,
of flimsy wings crisping, of high-flying Icarus
left roasting in the candle’s open fire. Monkey contemplates
the dry, tight wrinkles on the back of his paw.

Then he moves his hand slowly and casually through
the candle’s flame as he meditates
on the brevity of life and the multiple meanings
of an existence that precedes all essence.