Existentialism

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?

Monkey Temple Prologue

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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

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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.

Monkey Chews

 

 

 

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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.

 

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.