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Mokomboso Aug 2014
Dear Emma and the rest of the Sumatran orangutans of Chester zoo

To you, today was just routine. To you, in your bubble of a world, just another friendly face came to talk to you again. To me, this visit was bittersweet, in fact I would say 80% bitter. In seeing you, in meeting your gaze the guilt and shame ripped through me like like a tiger's claws. Ah yes, the tiger, 7 years have past since they had disappeared. People have all but forgotten already, there were plenty of tigers safely locked away right?
You probably don't know this and I doubt that you can read this, but I write this letter to you anyway, do what you want with the letter. Look at the photograph I have included of your Asian relatives that I took during my travels nearly 20 years ago. Or you could discard it, tear it, eat it I don't care as long as you receive this. For nearly 2 centuries your people have been captured and killed and we destroy everything you know. Our growing population pressurised us, we strove for urbanisation, painting a thin venire of chrome. Our colour of comfort, but we made it worse for ourselves as our most important livelihoods were replaced by dust villages and starvation. You were not immune to our pillage I'm afraid, from that first time Charles Darwin met Jenny our blessing became your curse. 3 weeks ago the last of your Asian brethren died. We saw your demise coming, some of us tried our hardest to halt or postpone it, setting up rescue stations and reserves. But the mindless machine wirred on, it wasn't until the last 90 miles of forest remained that the Indonesian bigwigs realised what they had done. In a blind panic they planted new tree seedlings, maybe somehow in the hopes that more bears, frogs, birds and orangutans would materialise from the roots? It was already too late but perseverance drove them to try everything. Everything. Nyaru Menteng offloaded their remaining 8 charges to Western facilities where artificial habitats had been created. The rest of them watched over and monitored the remaining native population, sending out vets and human doctors to keep them alive at all costs. I watched every second of it, followed the blogs and the news. It hurt so much I didn't think I could follow anymore, grief stricken with each "progression" but I was compelled to carry on. And finally, there was one.
A male, Gregory. He never grew his cheek flanges because he had no competition. No drive to find a mate. He knew as much as we did that he was alone. No one knew why they kept him there, all knowledge of reproductive biology was forgotten and replaced with superstitious magic. We kept him there, stayed by his side, fed him and doctored him until finally at the age of 39 he died of a heart attack. The news was like a punch in the guts for all of us. It was announced as breaking news all over the world, pongo pygmeus and pongo abeli officially extinct in the wild. A minority mentioned that many captive orangs still remained in zoos and sanctuaries and that we should not be so sad. But they were quickly shushed like an outspoken attendee of a funeral. Those remaining would not last forever either once inbreeding became too rife, plus, their artificial living arrangements meant these fat, shut in orangutans would live a second rate life, plagued by the same mental ailments that the rest of us urbanites suffer. They would never know the joy, fulfilment, danger, even, of the wild. And these zoo populations were like ghosts or holograms of what used to remain. 
I was afraid for the last 3 months to visit you again, incase you knew and you would turn your head away from me in disapproval. Your disgusted expression would render me speechless. But logic told me this would not happen and I had finally plucked up the courage to see you again. As always you brachiated towards the window and pressed your face against it while I talked to you and pretended to stroke your hair. You were oblivious and ignorant, I envied you. I cried and you wondered why, other humans understood and some looked forlorn themselves. I could see you and your granddaughter looking in concern at our apparent sadness. I tried to look brave for you, I played with your granddaughter as normal. 
Though I had no direct influence over your demise I feel just as remorseful as the loggers did, I was careless in my choices. Living such a sheltered city life and not realising until my second decade the true dangers facing you. I chose too late to be mindful of my grocery shopping, avoided palm oil, never watched films with trained animals in. My few actions made no difference, until very recent years I was still the minority. Don't mistake me for someone self pitying, I don't want you to think I was thinking only of my own feelings and being a martyr. If anything self loathing, I've always been a misanthropist but as of late I've abandoned my species altogether. Apart from my immediate family of course. You were not the only ones that went, Asian elephants too disappeared around the same time. Mackaws of South America have almost completely been depleted. The once hopeful 200,000 chimpanzees whittled down to the last 5000. Bonobos gone already from the wild since the last 100 were taken to sanctuaries and zoos to "rebuild the population" but there were very little captive bonobos to begin in. Gorillas: 1000 (only mountain gorillas are left, ironic isn't it? We focused so much on that one race we neglected the rest). African elephants: 4. Giraffes: 100. The list goes on. And we too, **** sapiens, the most numerous of large mammals are feeling the pinch. It started with Japan over 20 years ago, people retreated more and more into the office, no longer caring to build families and the population declined. The rest followed suite, bursting at the seems we could no longer steal more land for ourselves, more destruction meant less air to breath, less food. People have started to fight their reproductive urges, like the Japanese, retreating into a single life in a cubicle. Sitting by the screen. We are committing a species wide, slow suicide. I consider this a blessing, the rest of nature can finally get even. Some are scared and upset, others relieved. The divide is equal.
I have come to visit you every 3 weeks since I was 21, I am 40 now and in that seemingly short space of time I have seen the world change dramatically while you sit and climb and think your own isolated thoughts in your little bubble. 
Please accept my sincerest apologies. No matter if you read this or not. I am so so so sorry. On behalf of myself, on behalf of my species. Please forgive us.
Yours Sincerely,
Sophie
You know how I said I wasn't doing any more primate ones? I lied.
Not a poem but... this a hypothetical future (19 years from now) and the orangutans have become extinct in the wild.
Better the gorillas of Rwanda are given birth certificate
Within a brief while of their visiting the earth,
Their security is guaranteed by the state machinery
Basking in the full confidence of three meals a day,
Not wary of political repression based on suspicion,
They have a national day in their honour
Fully agitated for clean environment
By the political incumbentcy,
They are now the first class citizens
As the Rwandese citizens of human origin
Of varied political stand suffer under agony
In prisons and exiles, jails and hideouts
On the run for ever for fear of their lives.
Julian Jul 2016
Fragile egg-shell mind on dawn’s highway bleeding the segue between times traversed only in momentary dreams or in enduring excursions

We drag our droll and quaint 60s baggage like the luggage of a safari made of concrete girding a cavernous expanse of unheralded ground

With our ears oriented to the floor, we leap out of body never to deplore….never to ignore….never to miss the blue bus of our drafted imaginations, so carefully culled from brash elitism

I trounce the intervening time between being friendless and an ironic end, and an irenic comrade becoming the dearest amazed but always aplomb friend

We simper in our glorious traversal, and though bedraggled through an ornamented cavern we linger just long enough to be celebrated

Then a blues riff emanates from a vapid bar, and finally someone heralds my exhumed memory still rusty with the pavement of encased concrete on an empty or full tomb

So I wander in my mind to that roughshod Paris glassy tincture a romanticized gild of proper sensibility crafted in the tongues of lizards emulating the tongues of serpentine Anglicans

As the power of love transcends the love of power, both are afforded serendipitously upon the stately occasion of a fitful revolt where heads literally rolled and deaths still unfurl from the slippage of a violent malevolent eternity, crafting a new creative way to expedite the smite of preventable scourge

So Jim, I see your picaresque side and your wide-eyed love for a listless ship anointed of a crystal blip just detectable long enough on RADAR to become the statistic to crack the slim WHIP

No wigs are needed at this formality, no figs grow from trees forty-five years buried and almost a full month unsung

Pitiable cretins of an invented insanity, they scoff at my ravenous and portentous heart for its excess and for aligning with an upstart verging on only a specious insanity

Why in all humanity could a month be mustered with every defense of history and yet for it to be so widely flouted as a risible exercise in futility

The irony that the artistic glamor of a past vogue becoming a revival that is often toked only to one song but never to the memorial of great cavernous and commodious imaginations, staggers with dismay where otherwise the mayday would be a disaster but still a great day

Then I look at a triggered-fingered omen of a death so ominous yet so brazenly confronted as the ambassadors of time provide plaudits to a fearless martyrdom

Why such a sad spate, why such a stringent but malevolent fate a malediction on a family whose crest is not crestfallen like rolling waves but ornamented with gravity impounding its own weight

A fugacious tomb, an eternal flame, a swan song announcing an independent authority on a prescient demise mashed and deprived

A single shot rippling through the broadened space between clasped eternity and a histrionic disgrace as a psychological confederate pays lip service to a reiterative applause

A cousin hardly American in a defected record of incendiary plumes of a hoarse hatred of waxen discs and flying discs alike,  climbs out of a bonfire mounted purely out of vindictive spite

Then upon a great white buffalo a wrapped package of Californian love before California ever alighted like something beyond an avaricious dove, saw a rocky park and a hearth of illuminated darkness the singular spark

Captain Morgan knows the jackknife applause of a botched deal morphing into a disbelieved spiel. A shibboleth of enormous mystical weight crashing down from an ethereal abode and heaven heavily saddened cannot hardly appeal

Then a loving spoonful of crystal blue persuasion led me to Ethel’s regimented keepsake and for once in my life nobility and I became a grateful waif. But temerity laughed, splintered spacecraft, and the wooden paws of a bearish applause led to resurgent clarity

Blinking stars shattered by knighted and raw applause punctured the liberated might of a sentient hortatory savior grasped by the internecine wrench of a waxen time

An indie track slides by unnoticed in an aleatory time, and the threadbare whine of centuries of lament becomes a dastardly barn set ablaze with the fury of ancients and the scurry of faineant patents

Perfidy slides in recess, and in gentle forbearance the winged angel lingers like a halo on conifer and spring above a remedial ring

I dial frisky celerity tingling the dangling claws of a raven’s screed and in plunder of all history’s pilfer secrets I eagerly weave a tapestry Indiana Jones himself would be proud to watch

Not the riotous ruin of a mystery tour of verdure crippled by genocide but overcome by the revived life of raised rain razing the moments of indelible pain

But the culmination of a proffered time taken at its word for its every careened bird, for its every brazen gird. The manger of proctored stars calls us home tonight and home forever. Life in quaked timorous stumbles suddenly no longer so fitfully absurd.

The quixotic plundered of pirates and emperors in direct emulation of some crooned pastiche of whittled integrity, surges above any encased blurb and any vain testament to a pyramid rigid in destiny and ragged in desultory and sturdy sincerity

Multiplying the ineffable by the division of arable divorced from edible is too creative to be eaten as pabulum when sparks curdle flickered moonlight crimson and that become golden only to the last laugh of ennobled ragamuffins

Frankly the desert of melliferous gorillas abetting the lark of a heavily vetted camarilla engaged in the sinecure of a rigged wall on a main street to block the tall from the lame bleat. Stocks grazed, costs engaged on a littoral beach at the end of a Bossy promenade

This prayer is a cutthroat collapse of a merry spare, a ribbed ****** waiting to plunge into the antithesis of female despair, but sincere in its restraint that vixens courted in love aren’t courted in litigation of a wagered dare

Ambulances chase Deloreans through the desolate moon-stricken skies of a time agape with fleets of phantasmagoria on a Cliffside too wise to ever mince words or excise cries

Skulking the red-teared caverns of entombed films and lampooned tinctures on a passion vetted only for certain and utter deracinated disguise, I wallop with winged men in a single soul armed to the teeth with inveterate tithes to eternal internments of poached and endangered gazettes

As growth older in wizened skin bets on epithets rather than epitaphs for rinsed peace and triumphant clefts we leap above in orbit of only the bellowing nether of blown tolls and untold souls aggregating the esoteric grasp of Alexandrian tomes

The denumeration of certainty is a carousel of wonder, a splurge of time ripped asunder with majesties of paparazzi scuttled impacts a throttled iniquity of regalia’s indicted blunder frenchified but still clean with inestimable sheens

With twenty-five dollars, a dime an assist and a nickeled reiteration of currency already so personable it is divine and sublime in crazed desist I watch the embroiled natives clash in denatured violence with the warriors of a crossed repast hearkening to an old land much of ire but too much of grandstand to ultimately last

Itching for a holy field husk of peerless ties listed as rumpus and beer, a two-packed smoked by bludgeoned blokes careless in irascible sputters of a muffled doom, a Vegan becomes the author of too many sacrosanct homilies becoming defiled witchcraft brooms dead on arrival too many lionized tombs

In plaudits and the scause of an amplified “what if?” of an olfactory nightmare of petrified fog of effluvium bogged in Wade and in heat it is always clogged, sinewy libations of toasted preemptive revenge become a powerballed hog

A castle in the sky founded on Franklin but scourged of wineskins brimming with a distilled time, a swift repartee becomes the whispered ladder of saints blather becoming not rather other than a Dan Rather spatter

A door breeched by a broached inconvenience of amphigory beyond common reach, I clamber excess and whisk the lingered love into destiny beyond any word other than a beseeched preach of nothing tired but everything inspired of noble love with abundance often to teach

Fireworks of turned tides of fallow tithes to aliens beyond any conceivable bribe the bushwhacker writhes but survives staying alive without even a hint of garbled jive a 27th floor glass elevator is quite a resplendent ride

Wellsprings knowing radical rolled tides of errant dice also themselves guilty of confessional tithes to the monolith of avarice at the nooked cranny of an evaporated time we whine as the police sting the album rained with songs too lugubrious to sing but in their elegy every lonely heart has a propinquity phone of souled resonance ring

Iterative mastery of a mathematics of love, loss decay and the dross of a dental Occidental floss, the sweep of screened queues become questions of inestimable importance to foreign dues on a horse with no name but so consumed with fumes

A fright occultist thriller prowls in a waylaying daylight, masquerading an innocent confection for a rescued triage of a dawn stabbed with knives in our last dying days of trembled plight

He resurrects only the wraiths of detest, squinted at by the putrefaction of summoned cardiac arrest and littered with bullets that somehow can penetrate even impregnable bullet proof vests the wrapped carcass of the mummified husk of ready despair offers itself a ghoulish and raspy prayer

Synchronized in a low roaring swathe of rollercoasters too immersive to ride, the terpsichorean obscurantism of deliberately shattered fragments becoming blurbs dismissed with hijacked deride the carnival of a summer sun becomes the ocean of limitless love becoming endless fun

We forget the drawl of the droll old tales that haunt like specters in the closet and beneath the bedridden valetudinarian of an effrontery of shackled fright, we sprawl the innumerable caverns of prophetic insight afforded by the pantheon of history enter stage left, depart stage right

And with their insight I write and write, I grasp the tusk of democracy and wage an insurrection against the doubt of plodding limitations in otherwise immaculate sight

*** and tyrannosaurus rex, of litigable offenses leading to pardonable arrests, the gated entryway of a poetic splurge leads to the demiurge of a demotic enlightenment and suddenly the frank becomes the frazzled retirement and that haunting hounding bunny transmogrified by a shattered eye averts the car crash that careens ponderous engines out of limitless twilight blue skies.

Diamond lightning in pristine skies escorts the telegraphic totems of riddled modems from 1967 to 2016 and suddenly all venerable personages converge on a teeming scene of a union unified by a universal dream. To become everything and yet nothing and out of light and darkness to become a beatific beam
John F McCullagh Mar 2012
A pretty blonde researcher
was observing, from a “blind”,
some Silverback Gorillas-
among the final of their kind.

The senior of the silverbacks,
his back turned towards the” blind”,
was communicating with his troop
with gestures much like sign.

“She who is observing us
is a member of that tribe
who fell from grace with Heaven
and was banished far and wide.”

“They were banished from this Eden,
and confounded in their speech.
They then made war upon each other
and have never once known peace”

“Observe, in them, their arrogance,
they think themselves evolved,
Yet they are apes that practice war
and ****** their own kind”

“A gorilla child knows not but love
and tenderness in kind.
Where there is many a human child
left neglected on the vine.”

From elsewhere in the Jungle came
the shouts of evil men.
Poachers of the coarsest sort
with Silverbacks in mind.

“Disperse my sons and daughters.
It’s time to flee and hide
from those who seek our hides and meat
to sanctuary, hie.”

The silverback then beat his chest
and, to buy the others time,
charged against those evil men
and, for his children, died.

Time passed before the searchers
came upon the blind
where the murdered Dian Fossey lay
where the Silverback had died.

Poachers want no witnesses
to their  theft of meat and hide
They left with her the severed hands
of one not kin but kind.
A poem about Dian Fossey, murdered by poachers while studying the culture of the great Apes. For poetic purposes I have imagined the Apes to possess a language based on sign language. This has happened in captivity and is not beyond the grasp of their considerable intelligence.
Gary Brocks Aug 2018
At four, you took my hand and pulled me to your bed,                                                            
your small form cuddling, curling, you urgently said,
"Tell me… tell me a story! Story, make it long",
I began to tell the story, the story of when you were born.

Drums and bugles, bubbles and balloons,
somersaulting clowns and calliope tunes,
you came out to meet them, on the day that you were born,
and they were there to greet you, through a January storm.

Lions and gorillas marched to military airs,
snowmen and snowwomen danced without a spring time care,
somewhere in the harbor, a tugboat played a note,
and all the while you smiled a smile, upon a birthday float.

Just like a circus troupe, we formed a great parade,
and sauntered to the birthing bed where your mother lay,
she picked you up, she held you, as close as close can be,
her hand in mine, she softly said, “Now... we are three.”

Copyright © 2003 Gary Brocks
180827F

Children always want to know who their parents are; their thoughts, hopes, dreams, fears and actions at stages in their lives.
This poem, a poem in several parts (only the first part here), portrays a father for his child, through the manner in which the story of the child's birth is retold at various stages in their life together.
Aaron LaLux Jul 2016
Warning Shots

Yo boy just chill,
I don’t give a fck I’m a muthafckn gangsta,
don’t be fooled by this smile on my face,
nothing funny around this way boy,

I’m from the streets,
don’t underestimate this cracka,
just because I’m white doesn’t mean ****t,
we’re all strapped and we don’t play either,

I’ve had guns in my face,
looked straight down the barrel,
told those jackers they had the wrong guy,
waited a few weeks to sic the bloodhounds on them,

look man,
everything I am is real,
24 karat gold on my neck,
passport full of stamps,
angel wings on my back,
represents my lil sister that passed,
she’s my Guardian Angel,
she watches over me,
I’m not scared of death,
actually I welcome such things,

in the City of Angels,
where you could become one any moment,
born and raised,
from Mulholland Dr. all the way to Crenshaw in Compton,

come on son,
no need to test,
do you know how many mouths I feed,
do you know how many families depend on me,
do you really think that all of these,
cats I know will let you take the food from their mouths?

Don’t be so naive,

please,

just chill,
I don’t give a fck I’m a muthafckn gangsta,
don’t be fooled by this smile on my face,
nothing funny around this way boy,

I’ve really been there,
crack smoke and 40’s,
crackheads suckin’ *****,
used to call them Five Dollar Shorties,

of course we,
now dress well and don’t be startin’ ****t,
when you’re from the streets and had to eat beef,
once you get out you don’t want any part of it,

I started with,
no money not even a dollar,
and the best part about becoming self made,
is now I don’t have to be bothered,
I don’t have to engage with losers,
I don’t have to waste time with broke fcks,
I don’t have to engage with haters,
I don’t have to quarrel with the hopeless,

I wrote this,
as a warning and as a lesson,
the warning is don’t fck with us,
unless you come offering blessings,

the lesson is you can make it to,
if you just stop hating dude,
and if you want to try and take it dude,
trust me I’ve got gorillas that would just love breaking you,

I know guys with monster hands,
they could lift you up by your face,
then crush you whole skull in,
what part of don’t fckn fck with us do you not understand?

Yo boy just chill,
I don’t give a fck I’m a muthafckn gangsta,
don’t be fooled by this smile on my face,
nothing funny around this way boy…

∆ Aaron La Lux ∆

Volume 1
The H Trilogy
The City of Angels
I just published a new book.
If you could take a moment to check it out,
and even write a review it'd be most appreciated.
All profits go to a charity that prevents child abuse and ****** assault.
So not only are you getting an epic book of poetry,
but you're also supporting a good cause.
Thank you SO much!

https://www.amazon.com/Trilogy-City-Angels-Aaron-Lux/dp/1535054328
Straight Up
Jackie Mead Apr 2018
Between me and you, the day the Monkeys went wild in the Zoo,
was the best day I can remember, let me recall what I saw, at the Zoo on my birthday when I had just turned Two.

My Mum and Dad had taken me for the day, I sat in my pram with the perfect view, for a small person who had just turned Two.

Then came a loud high pitch shriek, from the cage that the three striped Night Monkey lived within.

The Zoo went very quiet, as my Mum would say, you could hear someone drop a pin.

The three striped Night Monkey would sleep all day, come out at night, woke up with a sudden fright.

He began to shriek and began to call, then he rolled over and bashed the cage, he was suddenly in a terrible rage.

His shriek woke up others too, that would normally sleep by day, a Bat-eared Fox, Bandicoot and Badger all woke up about the same time as each other.

The Monkeys in the next cage in sympathy with their kind picked up their food dishes and banged their bars, they weren’t going to be left behind.

I started to laugh at the Monkeys in the Zoo, it all seemed very funny to a small person who was only just Two.

From what I remember of that day the Gorillas chimed in next, they picked the fruit up off the floor and started throwing it at people stood by their door.

The Gorillas too banged their chest and let out a loud roar, as if to say, three striped Night Monkey it’s okay, we’ve got you today.

I ducked my head as a banana flew by and nearly caught my Dad in the eye, he didn’t think it was quite as funny as I, I spat out my dummy and began to shout, “come on Monkeys what’s it all about”.

The Orangutan woke from his very deep sleep, in the middle of the day, he was older than the rest and liked a nap from time to time, to keep sprightly and sound of mind.

He rose up from the floor, standing seven-foot-tall, made his chest twenty feet wide, banged with his very huge paws and shouted with a very loud roarrrrrr
“alright everyone what’s the fuss, why have I been woken up from my mid-day nap, what’s the problem, what’s the mishap?”

The Gorilla turned to the Chimpanzee, shrugged his shoulder as if to say, “any idea what’s happening today?”

The Chimpanzee had no reply, turned to the Bandicoot, Badger and Bat-eared Fox, as if to say “I haven’t got a clue what’s happened here, what about you the Fox with Bat-Ears?”

The Badger, Bandicoot and Bat-eared Foxed all turned to the three striped Night Monkey and said, “what’s up Night Monkey, why the rage, why did you start bashing your cage?”

“mmmm,” said the Night Monkey slightly embarrassed, “it’s not like I was being harassed, it’s just I don’t like spiders and one was hanging from the ceiling, I woke up with a dreadful feeling, that it was going to fall – that’s why I started to call”

I began to laugh even more “fancy a Monkey being scared of a spider, I’m much younger and I’m not scared of a tiny creature”.

My Mum and Dad saw the funny side too and began to laugh at the antics of the Monkeys in the Zoo.

The Orangutan was feeling happier he could now go back to his nap and the three striped Night Monkey he did say, “he would try to be more considerate of smaller creatures, as long as they didn’t try to nest in his handsome features”.

The Zoo began to return to normal and people went on their way.
I will always treasure, and it will always remain, the best day ever, the day the Monkeys went wild in the Zoo.
as i write this i am reminded of a time a gorilla threw a banana out the bars at me, one visit.
Phil Lindsey May 2015
Where you going?
What d’ya see?
A hundred thousand polka dots
A comin’ after me
Polka dots and tater tots
And french fried onion skins
A priest in a confession booth
Forgivin’ all our sins
Two or three gorillas
And an elephant in the room
Someone tell the maitre’ d
He’d best be leavin’ soon
Cuz the waiter and the waitress
Have figured out the plot
And if he hangs around much longer
He’s liable to be shot
By a psychopathic mushroom
Or a ******* pizza pie
While the rabid rocket scientist
Wonders how he got that high
The ******* with bedroom eyes
Looks the other way, and
The specialist in pantomime
Does not know what to say.
A hundred thousand looks at love
Not a single one survives
Yet, with regret and toil and sweat
We go on with our lives.
pwl 5/20/15
Mokomboso Aug 2014
Chimpanzees:
They’ve sparked our curiosity throughout the ages
Their familiarity became a curse
Prodded in the lab or displayed at the circus
The chimp is loud, boisterous, uninhibited
Known for his violence, infamous for warfare
But that’s only a fraction,
There is much love, caring and empathy in their interactions

Bonobos:
Spritely, funky and playful
These cute little apes look a lot like people
They are a trifle weird and ever so kooky
The lady is alpha, she forms alliances with ******* girl action
Dubbed hippies of the jungle, conflict is solved with a cheeky snuggle
But they’d rather not be typecast, if you mess with the bonobo
She’ll kick your ***!

Orangutans:
The thinker of the rainforest
Remembers more plants than a botanist
Don’t be fooled by her slow moving nature
Keep in mind she’s always watching, she’s a precise imitator
Patience is her virtue, planning her forte
They’re the zoo-mates most likely to escape
When they’re not being industrious
Their orangutan antics are quite hilarious!

Gorillas:
Undeserving of their movie monster status
The gorilla is a kindly, sensitive fellow
Shyly hides in his bushy terrain
Watching over his wives and children
He’s a protective father with an impressive physique
Built only on leaves! The gorilla has nimble fingers
And a nimble mind, not quite the brute we’ve been taught to despise
Though this has changed in recent years
This beef cake with a heart, we now hold dear

Humans:**
Weak and smooth with a layer of fat
His blunt canines give a poultry bite
His skull is round like an overgrown child
He forges his strength from the blazing campfire
He dresses in cloth and goes to work
The office quenches his ancient hunter’s thirst
Yet he knows not how to use his particular gift
He rapes and pillages the earth that birthed him
I swear this is the last primate one!!!! I know I'm obsessed but that's just me.  
This is for an art project, each verse actually goes with an illustration I've drawn.
Bunhead17 Nov 2013
[Verse 1: GREEKDAGOD]
You rocking with killers
Rocking with the realist
Rolling around gorillas
So how you going to get us
Yeah they call me greek
Yeah they call me greek
Riding around with hottest
I don't own no jeeps
Catch me up in that c05
Catch me up in that ride
Bad ***** on my side
Yall ****** wonder why
Man i rolling, man im rolling
Money man, im throwing
Dont catch me up in that stop
Yall ****** better know im on it
It don't need no intro
Make shawty go get low
Been real since 89
That shawty already know so
Started from the bottom
Now catch me up on that spot
Riding around with drizzy
We buying out those lots

[Hook: Drake]
Got everything, I got everything
I cannot complain, I cannot
I don't even know how much I really made, I forgot, it's a lot
**** that, never mind what I got, ***** don't watch that cause I
Came up, that's all me, stay true, that's all me
No help, that's all me, all me for real
Came up, that's all me, stay true, that's all me
No help, that's all me, all me for real

[Verse 1: 2 Chainz]
Money on my mind, you should think the same
J's on, pinky ring
******* these hoes, I need quarantine
In the same league, but we don't ball the same
(Ah) She want all the fame, I hear that **** all the time
She said she love me, I said, "Baby girl, fall in line"
Okay, made a million, off of denim, ****, watch me switch it up
Walked in, "Ill ***** alert! Ill ***** alert!"
You need that work, I got that work, got ******* in my condo
Just bought a shirt that cost a Mercedes-Benz car note
From the A to Toronto, we let the metal go off
And my **** so hard it make the metal detector go off
This that sauce, this that dressing, Givenchy, ***** God bless you
If having a bad ***** was a crime, I'd be arrested (True)

[Hook]

[Verse 2: Drake]
I touched down in '86
Knew I was a man by the age of 6
I even ****** the girl that used to babysit
But that was years later on some crazy ****
I heard your new ****, ***** hated it
Damon Wayans, homie don't play that ****
I get paid a lot, you get paid a bit
And my latest **** is like a greatest hits
*******, ain't no wishing over on this side
Y'all don't **** with us, then we don't **** with y'all
It's no different over on this side
*******, should I listen to everybody or myself?
Cause myself just told myself
"You're the ******* man, you don't need no help"
Cashing checks and I’m bigging up my chest
Y'all keep talking ‘bout who next
But I’m about as big as it gets
I swear y'all just wasting y'all breath
I’m the light skinned Keith Sweat
I'mma make it last forever
It’s not your turn ‘cause I ain't done yet
Look, just understand that I’m on a roll like Cottonelle
I was made for all of this ****
And I’m on the road box office sales
I’m getting paid for all of this ****
Ask you to please excuse my table manners
I was making room for the table dancers
‘Cause if we judging off your advances
I just got paid like eight advances
*******!

[Hook]

[Verse 3: Big Sean]
**, shut the **** up!
I got way too much on my mental, I learn from what I've been through
I'm finna do what I didn't do and still waking up like the rent's due
Not complicated, it's simple, I got **** ladies, a whole Benz-full
And to them hoes I'm everything -- everything but gentle
But I still take my time, man, I guess I'm just old fashioned
Wearing retro ****, that's old fashioned
*****, see what I'm saying, no closed caption
I paint pics, see the ****, good ***, need to hit
Keep a broad on the floor year 'round like season tickets
I plead the fifth, drink a fifth
Load the nine, leave you split, in the half, smoke a half, need a zip
My new girl is on Glee and ****, probably making more money than me and ****
I swear to God I got 99 problems but a ***** ain't one
I got 99 problems, getting rich ain't one
Like I got trust issues, I'm sorry for the people I've pushed out
I'm the type to have a bullet-proof ****** and still gotta pull out
But that's just me, and I ain't perfect, I ain't a saint but I am worth it
If it's one thing, I am worth it, ****** still hating but it ain't working
Lil' *****...

[Verse 4: Drake]
Oh me, oh me, oh my
I think I done ****** too many women from the 305
Before the end of this year, I'll do King of Diamonds three more times
Smoking on that kush all in our section like it's legalized
Girl, you can't always have your way, sometimes it be like that
They dont really **** with you like that, they ain't never did me like that
I just took my time, you got your shine, I let you eat like that
I've been taught to never loan somebody what you need right back
And I need that **** right back? (no more free Randy)
I’m blessed than a *******
****** been stressed than a *******
****** getting nervous, clutching they chests like a *******
**** that’s a *******
Tell the truth, I don’t listen to you
‘Cause I don’t like being lied to
And that ship won’t sail
And that wind won’t guide you
Daddy was in jail we was talking through the window like a ******* drive-thru
That was back then man, now my ****** rich enough to do whatever I do
I love this song..."All Me" by Drake ft. 2 Chainz ft. Big Sean ft. GREEKDAGOD...lol, i love Big Sean's part! :D
Trevon Haywood Dec 2016
This past year was a ******
Looking back, it kinda makes me wonder
How it came and went and **** near took everyone under
Its crazy out here and even though it was tough
I'ma run it back, this is 2016 Rap Up

Denver won the Super Bowl, Cam came up short
Leo got his Oscar and El Chapo got caught
They got mosquitoes with the Zika, so don't get bit
Peyton and Kobe Bryant both called it quits
I gotta admit, Fam, I get mad as ****
When I swipe my card and they say "No, You gotta use your chip"
**** Daniel, "Hamilton" was lit
Who let Kanye West get 53 million in debt?
And Rihanna went to work without taking a pause
ISIS popping and y'all worried about bathroom laws?!?
Come on, fam
How that sound?
So we out here standing up
Just so y'all can sit down?
Warriors went on a streak and then they got served
Panda was a hit and we couldn't understand the words
Huh, and Khaled kept snapping
These youngins keep mumbling
I guess y'all call that rapping
I've seen "Stranger Things", come on dude
Y'all out here shooting gorillas and punching kangaroos
Janet Jackson pregnant at 50, dog
So for you ol' broads, there might be some hope for y'all
I ain't throwing shade, it ain't that deep
**** I don't want nobody out here ******* with me in these streets
Then Birdman ran up on Charlamagne
And Lil' Wayne still not 'puttin' respect on his name'
Michael left Kelly trying to get paid
But the world stopped when Beyonce dropped Lemonade
She slayed, and over-shared
And ya'll still trying to find out about 'Becky with the good hair.'
As far as questions, I got one
"Hey Hov and B, is y'all finished or is y'all done?"
Son, I don't know if it was fake
I know KD did the running man challenge all the way to Golden State
The whole year made no sense
Dog, we live in a world without Muhammad Ali and no Prince
Then Gucci came home
And he looked so different y'all was like, "naw, that's got to be a clone"
Y'all was glued to y'all phones
And LeBron got it done for the Cavs and brought the chip back home
Snapchatting all over the place
I swear to God, if I see one more girl with a dog on her face
It was a sad year for sure
Instead of being woke though
Y'all wanted to play Pokemon Go!
And rap got weird, should we be concerned?
Young **** in a dress, Yung Joc got a perm
And everybody was in the Presidential race
Ryan Lochte, Oh he gets the Michael Phelps' face
Game and Meek beefing, Hillary and Trump
Kap took a knee, T.I., Brad Pitt got dumped
And Trump said he going to build a wall on the border
Ya'll will probably go to flip bottles water
The snow storm had the East underground
The kept shooting black men but wouldn't shoot killer clowns
They kept telling us to use our voices
Knowing **** well they ain't really give us no choices
Get an iPhone with no headphone cord
Or get a Galaxy and go and meet the Lord
See they go low, and we go high
You only got two friends. Why you trying to go Live?
I'ma miss the Obamas, I don't wanna see them go
My prayers to everyone that we lost in Orlando
The Oscars were so white they had to get Chris Rock
And the album of the year had to be Anderson.Paak
Cubs finally Won, Usain was on fire
Melania Trump hired the wrong ghostwriter
I'm petty with the manners
'Cuz I think Kim K. got robbed by Joanne the Scammer
Ooouuu
Biters keep testin' me
They making rappers, but they ain't got the recipe
Huh, Yeah that's facts
Shout to Young M.A. for bringing New York back
And I hear y'all talking about "Kanye is fine"
Well to us it look like Kanye done lost his mind
Cowboys kept ballin', them boys in the zone
Bryson Tiller came along, kept telling us "Don't"
I'm highly favored
I clap back on my haters
I be the beans, greens, potatoes, tomatoes
The mannequin challenge, oh, that's how y'all feel?
The World moving dog, we can't just stand still
Beyonce made sure y'all got in formation
One time for Phife Dawg from the Zulu Nation
Did Drake bag J.Lo? I say kinda
But y'all was all up in arms over Rob and Chyna
And that's a new level of female pimping
Biggest L of the year goes to Hillary Clinton
You ask me, man, I thought she had it made
You ask me now, ****, I think we all got played
Another sign of the times
And now the whole World laughing at us, sounding like ChewbaccaMom
2016 was a bully and a punk
On top of that, now we gotta deal with Donald Trump?
Pardon me, as I vent
Bro, we made a reality star the President
And that just makes me sick
Talking about, "We gotta give him a chance." Naw
I ain't got to give him ****
It's going to be hard to cope
Because you can't have progress, dog, if you don't have hope
More pros, less rookies
And if America's ours, how we let it get grabbed by the *****?
They say I sound mad, off the cuff
Oh, I sound mad? Y'all don't sound mad enough
So from here on out, we gotta set the tone
Y'all protect yourself and protect your own
And way too many people got called back home
2016 you can go, and I'm glad you're gone
Felt like a long bad dream
I'm wishing you love and life, Welcome to 2017.

Skillz 12/31/2016.
JC Lucas Oct 2013
The clock reads three A.M.
And you are listening to radio static
And you are picking feathers from your naked pillow
In the light of a nightlamp you kept near your bedside as a child
To keep the gorillas in your closet from eating you
Or whatever it is gorillas do with small children from the western world

And Somewhere in a country overseas,
A man is standing vigilantly on a beach
Waiting for the small mail boat from his home country
(which just so happens to be the same as your home country)
He is waiting to get any kind of word from the western world

Are you still out there, western world?

The childhood memories collecting dust on your shelves
and faint sirens soon lull you into a sleep that is barely more than a deep thought
where you dream of a girl with pineapple hair and an intoxicating aroma
And you think to yourself
Who still gives a **** about the western world?
And   then you kiss her lips and remember why YOU give a **** about anything in the

Western world

Is anyone out there, western world?

Anyone out there practicing western medicine?
Eating at some massive fast food chain that serves the parts of the pig you can't even name without vomiting?
Sitting on a couch made of the skin of an animal who your ancestors relied on to survive?
Buying jewelry for a member of the opposite *** whom you met no less than three weeks ago?

And in your light, restless dreams
you smell the pineapple girl's tranquilizing neck and you think
Is this happening anywhere else in the western

World?

Are people asking themselves questions they already know the answers to
And picking feathers from naked pillows at three o clock in the ******* morning while the sirens and radio static blare on
Because they're too proud to answer the questions that they know the answers to?
Is there anyone else confused in this vast low-budget carnival that is
the Western world?

And the answer is yes
This is happening everywhere
In this
Western
World.
Gray whale
Now that we are sinding you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours

When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your work to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important
Essen Sep 2016
****, this coffee's really sour
I've been drinking it for half an hour
Wanna hear a poem
Wanna hear a poem
Wanna hear a poem about a cauliflower

[Cauliflower's foolish
It doesn't fit the theme
I'm sick of all your nonsense
I'm tired of your memes]

Woman selling knickknacks
I'm not eating tic-tacs™
Your words were put in brackets
Check out my rhyming tactics

I see that you're not one for fun
Your a cloudy day, I'm the shining sun
My absurdity
Is the key
To happy for eternity

[You're clearly deeply broken
And only you can cure
Your fundamental problems
But really I'm not sure

The only one who conquers
Is one who really tries
So stop with the gorillas
Since everything will die]

Maybe you don't understand
My foolishness goes hand in hand
With making things that are the best
Like giant squids and turnip fests

Order, chaos, streets and bogs
Them, White, Color, Talking Frog
Odd on top but clear below
From ash and fire life will grow

Then again I see it's true
I am right and so are you
Maybe we both have a claim
In this crazy poet game

[x_x
Okay]

That didn't rhyme!

[It doesn't have to]

I love you

[Mmm hmm]
I know I said "soon", uh, nearly two months ago. Nothing really moved me to write a poem until today. This came from a conversation with my cool bud, Ashr, whose poems you should check out, even if they aren't Fun Poems for Cool People. I'd written the first stanza and sent it to her and she put her own spin on it in order to show me how to improve it. This led to a bit of a debate about what makes a good poem. I ended up keeping my version of the first stanza but extended the poem to give it more depth.

In a way this poem is representative of the conclusion I came to in the last rhyming stanza. It is foolish, but it's substantial foolishness that doesn't exist for its own sake. She ended up liking it when it was done. I hope you do too!
David Jul 2018
It is angel impact bullwhip vivid
Stampede fingers landscape obedient
Jail bust escape laughing run
Spillway thought stream fuzzy essence
UGG boot toe tubs and water stings
Earthquake tyrant Celsius fools
Pin lake petrol ice filled deserts
Spiky flames in outer space
Sculpture freak show withering exhibit
Fathom emergency breathe and ****
Nut shell gorillas invisibly cracked
Cow fed nirvana BBC
Shades of zero audio cauldron
Same vein madness virus mansion
Culinary horror infection procedures
Geyser rich nutrient pea-pod turmoil
Third Eye Candy Mar 2013
you are the light at the end of a tendril. a spindle of dread, woven in caustic guile of argyle
parallelograms...phantom realms of solid waste. you are the pin in the subject. gating satan through a thimble
of crocodile tears, the new symbol.
the rude glyph in black bibles and strong drink, en-kindling the dead. rodents ponzi the scheme
of hell’s maze, with lies...your lies...
you have  eyes that  lead aside from your heart’s plot
you are saboteur. banal.
unrestrained waste. you are the fin in the barracuda puppet, grazing the wrist of Dim Henson
huffing crystal gorillas in the congo of your foyer
you are
the black chandelier.

teach me your cheap trick
striking off ‘ iron-on’  pinkie swears
your praline heresies... your  ‘ no remorse’    code
lay bare to me.

better my better angels,  to fathom the loathsome ****
of your actual mind. keep me abreast of your wretched games...
apply the rod of your wrong  love, above all.... you must betray.
you must know in your fetid rot
of a third eye... the phlegm genius of **** blindness.... teach me the rictus of
cold hearted.  a false god in my lotus !

spare me the chaste suzette
flip me the ***** that spits fables.
learn me the savage puns
to pummel you         sustaining your worst done.
grant me the lethal beans for my sacred cow
trade me the idylls of your forked heart
for your crushed null
and crossed
bones.
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
Wicked nether-land. Nether world, white, askance. Capitulating mangroves, verdant trees spliced with hyperbole, onomatopoeia, and manilla envelopes; her world is stuffed with secrets, she listens to gorillas cracking mussels a kilometer away, near a rill. Never she thought. Nothing that could provide....providence. Mangled heliographs  sprayed all over the everywhereworld.

"Don't be S.A.F.E.," she whispered. A bouquet of gorse, cistus, and pimpernels squished in her small fingers. She climbed her way through the pedimented stairway, then collapsing on the porch. Legs spent, and spread out upon the desiccate grayed four by four planks of the portico.

And as time elapses, the shuttering shake of the hemlock, which writhes through her skinny nimble dactyls, upwards straining the heart as its toxic bends appendages- crisp cerise lumens bend on the Titanium White walls, where only shadows bend time. The hour, still nine. Every adornment, furnished with red and its hues. Not purple, periwinkle, or any masked enhancement.

These are the symbols that reticulate splines, that curve temperatures, perverse hemispheres and debunk worlds. Upped antes, verbs that terns flirt worth, birth words. Ooh. Aah. Camera. The forest wraps her in its verdant pasture, where at last the moribund tamarisks disperse.

While at the plateau she is quiet and longing. Arms astride, dangling. Vaunt with highs and bliss- a kiss of withstanding pleasure serves her the cure for a lifetime of whining. This, yesterday where her body rattled through crooked vines. Square ships toasting her vocal melancholy in the sweet-waters of Time. So that all of her ripened limbs could grow, no more sheepishly than the magic she knew as a child. Stress free. First among the Earth-words, verbed-up and made jealous by pronouns that encompassed her joy-brimming hide. Closing down her voice and hugging her from behind.
Raymond Johnson Jan 2014
the year is two thousand and fourteen and something isn't right

maybe it's related to the fact that there is no more history on the history channel

and the only thing the discovery channel wants to investigate
is the depth of our bank accounts

the word 'integrity' has become archaic. obsolete. unnecessary, simply, because nobody has any anymore.

whatever happened to learning for the sake of learning?

who was the sick greedy ******* who decided that it was okay to charge money for knowledge?

our youth are being put into ******* for the knowledge necessary to survive in this society

of inequality.

in the 21st century slaves toil away in classroom as well as coal mines.

and those who dare to resist the path of post-modern peonage laid before them are doomed to a life of minimum wage mundanity or constant criminal risk.

there is something to be said about the quality of our reality if we are constantly seeking mind altering substances to escape it.

i too have become a slave. and a large portion of those who read this message have as well.

our souls signed away at the dotted line, sealed within great paper phylacteries adorned with the sinister sigils of Sallie Mae.

the chains of our debt will never let go of us. even upon death our progeny will have to hoist our burdens on their shoulders.

and for those of you who know not of our *******, i bid you welcome, like a Brother greater than I once said:

"welcome to the united snakes, land of the thief, and home of the slave. the grand imperial guard, where the dollar is sacred and power is god."

if your total net worth rests below a cool few million i suggest you stay away.

silly me. silly me, silly me, silly me. after all this country was built on generation after generation of genocide, **** and fraud, codified into the laws we hold so tight and so high, how naive was i to even expect civil discourse and equality from a naturally sinister state?

cloaked in the fog of pure ignorance we the people paradoxically bear the weight of our fraudulent federal government on our backs while simultaneously parasitically depend upon it.

parapets and gaudy domiciles all built with the blood sweat and tears of the disenfranchised. soft music composed of the screams of children dying from predator drone hellfire missiles lilts through the hallways.

news flash: the illuminati and the reptilian overlords are not trying to control your mind.

this is not about pineal gland calcification and third eyes but about the systematic disenfranchisement and subjugation of every man woman and child in this unfortunate nation.

they impose harsh sentences on small time drug crimes and outsource our only sources of economic stability.
left with no upward mobility, we then resort to any means necessary to simply survive.

'the world is your oyster.' they say. and they conveniently fail to mention the fine print which emphatically states that you may only possess the oyster shucking knife if you are white, male, and upper middle class.

this is not about checking privilege and white guilt. this is about the way that this ****** up world works. about the sinister cogs turning behind the scenes.

and if you dare raise your voice in resistance you'll find yourself staring at cinderblock walls, spools of barbed wire, reinforced steel bars, and armed guards for the rest of your sad life. your enclosed inmate existence making the coffers of the prison-industrial complex even deeper.

some say we should raise our fists instead and fight. and i say to them good luck fight the world's most technologically advanced military in its own home territory. Guerilla warfare and armed millitias stand about as good of a chance and gorillas armed with sticks and stones when the enemy possesses satellites that can see your face from orbit.

and i hope you don't mine being despised by the public of the modern world when you're slapped in the face with that dreadful catch-all term that is 'terrorist'.

but we can't just sit here and let the vines of greed asphyxiate our vitality away.

so herein lies the eternal question that i pose to you:

what are we to do?
this is my first attempt at a slam poem
Brycical Jun 2013
about pictures of bears without any fur, and they look horrendously terrifying. Like ****** space gorillas you see in poorly done sci-fi movies. Do you think panda bears are still the cutest bear without any fur?

I wonder if dragons get lung cancer from all the smoking they do. I'd rather think about a hairless panda bear breathing fire--it's jaws sinking into the underbelly of a mortally wounded dragon and as it starts munching on the dragon pancreas, it accidentally sneezes causing it's lunch to incinerate to ashes.

That's probably why dragons are extinct. Hairless panda bears donned armor, riding horses; questing to eat dragon pancreas.

They also thought amor prevented lung cancer. It was the middle ages, people or animals didn't have modern technology to explain diseases, let alone where babies came from. Except for dragons, and look at how their species turned out.   ****, I'm throwing my phone in the toilet right now.
JoJo Nguyen Nov 2013
Tree of proto-monkeys,
brand and banded under Monkey King,
so clever, so adaptive
in substance and doing -
mushrooming in variants:
lemurs, monkeys old and new,
orangutans, gorillas, chimps,
and one big bushy brood
of extincted ***** brothers and you.

Trekking upright into dale,
valleys and over hills too
sore in feet to image
dragging a knuckle or two.

Scavengers making way,
scanning for patterns in
food moving or not,
adaptive doing from fin
to opposable rock.
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2016
i swear, the biggest anti-ageist
comeback missing
from the script of we **** the old way
lies with the scriptwriter's
phobia of o.c.d.,
                 i'm guessing he experienced
it personally,
              i wish he experienced dementia
clearer of his granddad
   succumbing: o.c.d. in old age?
it's not big deal... it's no big deal...
             enough botox and soon all that glamour
and paying your respects soon fades,
fattens up and chokes on the artistic
rubric: you need rich artists to
satire rich people... stop nagging
at Katy... be, *******, thankful,
you little cat-whiskers for a ******
moustache kitty-fiddler...
           ever **** at a girl taking a selfie?
let's say it's a blank canvas, and
you're working on it...
        how can this girl can become a
crown or the abhorred fling with
missing Welsh fetishes of excess
           ****** dangle-bits?
                       i have few entry points
i like i consider...
                 before she shaves the *****,
but did you know my godmother
           is a doctor and she doesn't shave
her legs?
                     i joked at that,
i joked for the simplicity:
              why do i have to don mine
and the theory of Darwinism is never
complete? because of aesthetics,
there's a natural instinct, a natural bound
contraband that IS NEVER, EVER TINGED WITH
CHRISTIANITY... **** Radio Maria and
Priest Rydzyk too along with
                John Paul the Tarmac Kissing Saint...
popes like pop-stars: the world's a stage:
better look the prettiest...
             thank Katy... she got cool and rich
enough to covert any criticism of wealthy kids
of Las Vegas...
                          if she wasn't here i'd be dead:
i don't love her like a girl might love
the next best: never-left high school bestseller
for young girls...
                                     my black horse is
quirky and still working on working smug
rather than donning a thong at a cat-walk...
                 but my point?
the comeback the gangsters should have served up
those ****** lips?
                                rapper movie
fakes never taught you how to shoot...
                the gun goes linear: shoot, vertical...
not cool-sly horizontal...
                         you're shooting with a blind spot...
rich girls' songs for poor girls to
cat-fight over who's the better gimmick
of impersonator...
                      but the old Hackney farts still
don't have the quick-snap-comeback...
                  the colts keep referring to E2...
a postcode...
                       the old ladies should have said:
i better move there, seems like a hot-spot
for the postcode lottery!
                           the colts keep referring
to the E2 club....
                             the crew, the gang...
i'm still thinking about these pensioners
nailing them to chairs and drilling through their
bones to the marrow for the Moscow ladies
acting out the faint in the hands  
                       of chevaliers of her retirement plans...
E2? is that a postcode lottery for
                 the losers?
and the "sad" story is? in Poland we all came from
a Communist housing estate...
            only peasants in semi-detached housing...
i guess all these smart-*** young folks
are pretending to be gangsters when all they're
all aspiring to is own a pair of shoes with hay sticking
out of them: and i.t.v. come november...
               well, the casting was smart,
the accents 10 out of 10...
                   but the final point of the accents
in talk?              slow math...
                            is      E2 designated as
the case for a joke about postcode lottery?
                 one thing they're loudmouths...
another that they're also foul-mouths...
                             can't be one and the other...
                  if you're going to be a prop'ah
foul-mouth, better be a slow-mouth
               or a shush-mouth...
                                  and if you're going to
be a loud-mouth, i'd prescribe you Southampton's
away-support choir: oh when the saints...
oh when the saints come marching in...
                                no wonder gang culture
never picked up from loud-mouth birthrights of
the suggested History X...
                               borrowing from History ***:
flash news! there are more things on
my head than just hair to play toothpicks with concerning
self-doubts and the easiest solution:
            a man was crucified...
                               some say we never perfected
democracy as the civilised peoples of the world
as the Jews never perfected plebiscites as the
              "backward" peoples of the desert...
           if race coordination can't be joked about
but getting offended at:
           i'd love the Irish potato diet and the
dates served for breakfast lunch and dinner in Israel...
or in better representation?
the Pig of God... Jesus stinking like a pig
                 before the perfumes of Pilate...
skew: north-by-northwest: a good Hitch reminder:
sheep up toward Scotland...
                           but pigs that north and east...
well: pigs...
                         or how to make words
holy and meaningless when talking about the price
of butter...
                     but that's beside the case for
a quick comeback about the postcode lottery...
           or the grit of Bronson - the film,
esp. the nurse scene...
                       no spoilers... you never know when
it's happening...
                                 the greater the film,
the more monologue orientated...
                                    claustrophilic -
                                                   so you wonder
shoving that **** into the craniums of little boys:
why are they making them do it...
                        and at what point is it legal in
the social realm of guessing at all the rainbow possibilities?
   my theory? most paedophiles had failed
relationships in their teens...
                                  and they never wanted to
experience the complexities of a woman who finally
realised: ****! daddy died! i'm not a princess!
                   it's not a fear of being inadequate,
it's the fear of an inadequate woman...
                  the most adequate woman is a woman
who still resolves to the idealistic world,
rather than the realistic world -
                                   i never understood the
criminal hierarchy...
                                       in the criminal ring it would
appear no moral superiority is akin
   to bullying in school...
                                              choose the easiest
loss of moral judgement and bash it into the head...
    or what Marquis de Sade taught me...
               for most men it's the pink elephant in
the room...
                              or a light-bulb...
****** and theft is still all Robin Hood, the instilled
   heroism: moral ambiguity...
               i don't see how the other crime isn't also
an ambiguity...
                              the *** of man is already displaced
from the *** of woman...
                      why wouldn't age by that ****** ambiguity
not be squared? and doubly unfathomable?
   what made me write this?
               standing at a bus stop...
a girl coming back from school...
                                                 what?
this is a cognitive ping-pong...
                                     what?
                                                   what?!
               i'd dare David the Naturalist come out
from his comfort environment of
                 two monkeys *******, gorillas
with harems and all that easy gesture...
                   man and woman? eyes.
     all the limbs and bones captured by the eyes...
it's not that i don't spend enough time among people
to start imagining these quirks...
                 it's that i spend enough time
                 among people to not start imagining
quirks.
we gathered in a lighted tower
of a lower Manhattan promontory
seminarians listen
to discursive ramblings
of bank industry experts
on the finer points of
Basel II
Tier Three
op risk

towards a better better
best practice
we pique our ears to hear
the critical
dispassionate annunciations
of expert expertise

a panel of practitioners
a panoply of knowledge
networking opportunities
and hands on insight
we are granted
institutional affirmation
nesting warmly
in a corporate cocoon
13 flights up
off West Street
10 bucks a seat
30 for non-members

we settle
in soulless white rooms
divided by long
horizontal wall panels
bleached of all humanity
visualizing phantasmagoric vistas
of changing regulatory landscapes
in strait backed chairs
resembling the blanco armor acrylics
of Imperial Stormtroopers

on watch for Black Swans
the panel's moderator incants
if one appears
we told you so
if one fails to materialize
risk managers
have earned their dear keep
seminarians chuckle

the dais backdrop
a massive SONY plasma screen
stares down seminarians
with ruminative bleakness.
no digital blips or power points
will convey any meaning
turn a clever phrase
sprout a statistic
paint a pretty picture,
just the plain spoken word
of highly credentialed
speakers with bios
many paragraphs long
confers license to speak

the screens blackness
a perfect counter point
to a rooms spare whiteness
and pedestrian furbishment
save a day glow Warhol Print
of the heroic MTV moon walker
and a predominant majority
of Far Eastern attendees

questions from the floor
drizzle the panel
tied tongues
use tight selective language
of lexiconic colloquialisms
speaking a queer vernacular
of erudite bombastic bunk

questions are mumbled
with increasingly greater acuity
dancing around bank meltdowns
and global economic catastrophes
with a self anointed smug absolution
and poignant failure to acknowledge
a failures paternity
pink elephants and 800 pound gorillas
remain dance hall wallflowers


to be sure language evolves
the moderator instructs
as regulatory guidelines converge
to address market flux.
Is everyone comfortable with
the current acronyms
we devised
to describe our
present situation
best laid plans
and timely initiatives
to safeguard capital adequacy
and institutional solvency
right here in our own
little tower of Babel?

My tie is too tight
to clear my throat
I can't ask my question
of apples to apples
dust to dust
and oranges to tangerines
while the halting speech of others
is broken up
by timely ring tones
from Jeopardy
and Gene Autry's
Don't Fence Me In

every once in awhile
a chuckle is raised
we laugh about the score
in this inside baseball game
of capital requirements
regulatory Nexis
and smart *** traders
plying bold arbitrage strategies
blowing us back to Basel I
after the global bank implosion
oh the hilarity
of credit crises and crashes
the jokes on us
the joke-sters R US

some begin to
urgently finger blackberries
sending confident commands
to be dutifully carried out
by young back office minions
impatiently waiting
hanging on every word
of unintelligible texts
eagerly biding time
to take
the solid senders warm seat
in these cold blanched rooms

Closing the seminar
the moderator's summation
offered the thought
that her fondest hope remains
scenario analysis,
stress testing
and the new
emerging paradigms
will become
embedded in
risk management
best practices
and that fewer regulators
will be needed to regulate
and we will continue
to be employed
(nervous chuckles)
clapping
reception for networking
to follow
questions
and
cocktails
in the next room

I move quickly
to fill my plate with brie
English tea crackers
and a smoky tangy cheese.
A fellow seminarian
approaches me.
He smiles and asks,
Whats your name?
What do you do?
I tell him
and ask the same.
He says he is 50
and unemployed.
He sounds unsure
and frightened.
I bite into a chunk
of exotic cheese.
******* crumbs fall
onto the lapel
of my freshly pressed
pinstripe suit.

Music Selection:
Miles Davis
Red China Blues

jbm
NYC
03/03/09
martin challis Feb 2015
One

The body is a song
Beat after beat the drummer keeping time
Saves one beat for you and one for the heart of the world

Two

When humans care for orphaned gorillas
They are human beings – being human
The gorillas
Witness to an endangered species.

Three

Three wise men arrive in Las Vegas. They're confused. The city of stars accepts their gifts in return for chips and exchanges their camels for Pontiacs.
Eventually the three men run out of goodwill and are asked to leave the star-city.
Now each of then wears self-correcting sunglasses, far more cautious when following the brightness of artificial light.

Four

The world is a box with clear sides
Through this we see the sky dark and the sky light
We see four directions on all horizons
And constellations that rise and fall
Shut your eyes and listen carefully
You can hear the lid open every time one of us enters
And one of us leaves.

Five

The lad in the schoolyard solves a problem with the same
Mathematical precision of his father
He counts on his five fingers and divides them
Into one tight fist
With this math he gets a perfect score and
None argue with the result.

Six

When all the world clocks stop ticking.
They will each tell of a different time: during rush hour, before the interview, at the moment of martyrdom, just after take off, when war is declared, the date and time of your birth.
On any given day each one will tell the truth - at least twice.

Seven

Seven sons were seven suns a'shine on everyday
Yet seven suns one day went dark to shine another way
Seven dwarves in darkening hue imminently benign
No longer to bright any sky and none would see the sign

Eight

Eight accounts of starving populations
Eight charity organisations seeking aid
Eight million raised per quarter
Quartered by eight reasons to extract a share
Before the rest is shared to the rest
Who continue to starve.

Nine

Nine millimetre cannon kills you with a slightly larger calibre than eight millimetre cannon. Makes a slightly larger hole, travels slightly quicker, has a slightly longer trajectory, provides a slightly louder thud or thwuk when it hits the target.
This knowledge may not prevent you from coming to harm; but at least if killed by nine millimetre cannon, you'll die well informed.

Ten

How many cynics does it take to change a light bulb?
As many as it takes to be satisfied with this as an ending.



MChallis © 2015
Nigel Morgan Jan 2013
1

Late afternoon
leaving the city
the bus route intersects
the terraced houses,
row upon row:
right to the valley floor,
left to wooded heights.

In a bay-windowed room
a child sits at a table
beachcombing the net.
Tea is past
and there is gentle talk of
volcanoes , the Verungas,
and gorillas in the midst.
Outside, and a floor below,
a garden nestles into the dusk,
a blackbird settles itself with song.

Later, at the same table.
there is a silent grace.
A shy five year old
in scary pyjamas
comes to say goodnight.
For supper: a goat’s cheese flan,
a simple salad,
pink wine,
strong coffee.

On the mantelpiece:
the familiar jumble of cards and photos,
a collage of family faces distant shores.
On the walls:
grandmother’s woven rug,
her grand-daughter’s textiled strata,
an embroidered geology.

2

The next day,
so bright and clear,
the garden bench is warm by ten.
We sit surrounded
by the evidence
of this growing season:
emergent plants, the possibility of fruit,
even declarations of vegetables.

As ideas flow
across cake and coffee
so the shadows move,
shaping depths, enriching tones
on greys, within greens.

In the midday sun,
the garden becomes
a wild tracery of lines
as perspectives
distort, corrupt, thicken . . .
and space opens everywhere:
foliage as yet transparent
no shelter to stalk and stem.
Their very arteries revealed,
plants bask in the fragile heat
of ‘just’ Spring.
Robert Ronnow Jan 2020
"The question should not be in what ways writing and utterance trope each other, but how both are involved with number. Without relating the technology of writing to number (as opposed to sound or drawing), it is impossible to discuss it meaningfully as an aspect of versecraft."

          Courage to write and courage to not write. Read
          The great poets and highly accomplished letters
          Of leaders. Yet the war and the book have lives
          Of their own. Vacuum house, analyze mankind.
          His idea of himself. Ideas subsumed
          By better ones unite people into one people.
          I watch from my little bowl of nuts. Watch
          The one red squirrel and the many gray.
          Watch the nuthatch pair, platoon of chickadees.
          Here is what I say: When we can go
          From planet to planet on nothing but air,
          Leaving behind a drop of water,
          No burger bags blowin’ in the sun,
          I’ll love my children, my dogs and be happy.

"What is needed is a way to pry apart the polar, mimetic fiction that undergirds discussions (even sympathetic ones) of writing and versification, and see how we can relate writing to measure. Roy Harris’ investigations into the origin of writing make this connection possible."

          Electronic millennium. A long silence
          Wouldn’t hurt. Not that the national debate
          Should cease, it should proceed, passionate
          And furious. Those who have studied the matter
          And have something to say should write cogent
          Opinion pieces on the totalitarian
          Tendencies of minaret Islamists,
          The terminal contradiction of advancing
          Democracy with the unitary military.
          George Washington would not have approved
          And even Lincoln vacillated between
          The practicalities of preserving union
          And the ideal of freeing slaves. The president
          Carries his burden of matter, the physics
          Of existence cannot change our aloneness
          Or the butterfly’s importance, the very
          Last insects at the screens of August.
          It is life we face and death we meet.

"He argues that the origin of writing did not lie in the drawing of figures, or attempts to imitate speech, but in the recording of number. According to Harris, the oldest ‘writing’ that we have, like that on the 11, 000-year-old Ishango bone, is in ‘lines.’ The surface is scored with rows of short, parallel strokes, which probably served a numerical function. We still use such scoring systems today on occasion."

          OK, different strokes. But reading North’s poems
          And his predecessors’ in which noun and verb
          Are so far separated by modifiers,
          Post-positioned prepositions, diversions
          Into ditches, gardens, heavens, I don’t know
          What to do laugh or put the book down and eat
          Several cookies. In other words, anything goes,
          There truth resides. 1/3 life in suburbs,
          1/3 on the subway, and the last third
          On the mountain. A fourth hallucinating
          In heaven. That’s how it goes. You get what you believe.
          Bones in mud. It’s always possible I suppose
          That for nine months analogous or symmetrical
          With gestation our souls wander call it limbo,
          Doing the limbo and harassing the living
          With unanswerable questions, finally accepting
          Free molecular rent in a cubic meter
          Of interstellar space, a rose hip.
         
"Harris speculates about counting by scoring:"
'What is relevant for our present purposes is the fact that counting is associated in many cultures with primitive forms of recording which have a graphically isomorphic basis... The iconic origin of such recording systems is hardly open to doubt: the notch or stroke corresponds to the human finger...'

          Partridgeberry, mugwort, mats of raspberry,
          Cranberry, bearberry, autumn eleagnus,
          Autumn Nocturne, Autumn Leaves, the changes
          To the tunes and the scientific names.
          When it doesn’t matter what you do
          You’re probably doing something new.
          That’s a woodpecker. That’s a moth. I’m bounded
          By my surroundings, I feel at home.
          Could be Schenectady. Could be Troy.
          One of many small cities in which to while
          Away my anonymity. Be specific.
          Not asphalt but impermeable surface.
          Not trees but mature stems. Quercus rubrus—
          Quality veneer. Into such a garden
          Have a victor and a fool penetrated.

'In short, the rows of strokes are graphically isomorphic with just that subpart of the recorder’s oral language which comprises the corresponding words used for counting. It makes no difference whether we ‘read’ the sign pictorially as standing for so many fingers held up, or scriptorially as standing for a certain numeral.'

          In a crowded world every action results
          In an equal and overwrought reaction.
          Yet, all the energy recycles
          And there is not one thermal unit more or less
          When all is said and won. Even when the tribes
          Were isolated behind mountain ranges
          And rushing rivers, they sought each other out
          For trading and for taking. Humanity
          Is lonely. Humor is the only remedy
          And going to your daily discipline
          The only way past Monday. Join the torrential
          Flow of words, emotion, wit and erudition.
          It is embarrassing to see a good writer
          Work himself into a lather, having
          Something to say. A system of beliefs
          To illustrate, characters dressed accordingly.
          Gardens and wilderness in which to wander.
          A cave with a view. The plumbing problem never
          Resolves. Fax your results. We’ll be working late.

"Along with other evidence, this leads him to argue that the invention of writing–or the division of writing and drawing into separate functions–occurred when the graphic representation of number shifted from the token-iterative system that appears on the Ishango bone, to type-slotting."

          Electricity is occult enough for me.
          Excessive classifying could be fascist!
          Yet how else can one organize people
          Into contexts. By their associations.
          Family, work, habits, each assigned
          A day of the week, moon of the month.
          Poets rhyme, jazz musicians count time.
          There is more than one way to make war. By
          Declaration, by punishing offenses
          Against the law of nations, by granting letters
          Of mark and reprisal, by making rules
          Concerning captures on land and water, by
          Suppressing insurrections and repelling invasions,
          Erecting forts, magazines, arsenals,
          Dock yards and other needful buildings. Today
          I face the blank page between the finished pages.

"Harris gives the following example of what he means:"
'The progression from recording sixty sheep by means of one ‘sheep’ sign followed by sixty strokes to recording the same information by means of one ‘sheep’ sign followed by a second sign indicating ‘sixty’ is a progression which has already crossed the boundary between pictorial and scriptorial signs.'

          When my grandmother considered it favorable
          That I would be a writer, she had in mind
          Clear commentary from which many people
          Would derive meaning. No such luck. My writings
          Are like the flicking tail of that flycatcher,
          And I am the flycatcher, weighing but an ounce.
          My grandfather’s rough-hewn peasant chairs
          Are well known by my sons though they never knew him
          And the chairs were not hewn, just owned by him.
          One is in a corner of the room and two
          Are scrimmaged around a computer screen.
          Computers post-date him and cars post-date
          His father and so on. If the grid collapses,
          The crops fail and the roads close, some will be forced
          Across boundaries among boulders, naming snakes
          And stars according to memory.
          They will be hungry, mortal and strong.

'A token-iterative sign-system is in effect equivalent to a verbal sublanguage which is restricted to messages of the form ‘sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep...’, or ‘sheep, another, another, another...’, whereas an emblem-slotting system is equivalent to a sublanguage which can handle messages of the form ‘sheep, sixty’.Token-iterative lists are, in principle, lists as long as the number of individual items recorded. With a slot list, on the other hand, we get no information simply by counting the number of marks it contains.'
"When this change occurred it opened ‘a gap between the pictorial and scriptorial function of the emblematic sign’, which had been previously inseparable in the counting represented by rows of slashes."

          No book I know tells if blue cohosh
          Caulophyllum thalictroides—a barberry—
          Is edible. Other barberries are
          But that blue berry looks risky to me.
          And May-apple—Podophyllum—other
          Than the fruit itself which is definitely
          Sweet. So I read, not sure of myself.
          There is a patience with which to wait out anger,
          And a patience with which to endure ignorance.
          The job is everything. It is freedom
          And purpose and religion. It is acceptance
          And shelter and sustenance. Last night
          We were watching Tweet’s show: groveling before
          The rich pharisee’s judgements. I said no
          Amount of money could make me grovel
          Before that guy. His toupe’s gayer than his lisp.
          But who am I? You think bullets won’t ****?
          I’m the guy they put before a wall and shoot
          Then eat lunch. But that feeling passed quickly.

"This semiological gap, made writing possible because it meant that signs could be manipulated to ‘slot’, or identify, anything whatsoever. The open-ended quality of the scriptorial sign was a necessary precondition for the development of writing systems."

          Lately I’ve been copying wholesale
          From the great poems, lines and ideas not my own
          Or owned by all? It’s ok, I can be ignored
          Or appreciated in a future city,
          By a future shore. The honest man can
          Only recognize what he loves and point to it.
          That Borges poem called In Praise of Darkness.
          Emerson and snow. A meditation
          That bumps serenely, with acceptance,
          Between things and thoughts. It is said one should
          Know for whom, to whom one is writing.
          These are letters to those who love letter writing.

"As Harris points out, no writing system is accurately phonetic. Even the alphabet only highlights certain phenomena in the speech stream. The reason for this is that alphabetic writing did not begin as a simpler or more accurate way to record speech than other writing systems, but as an easier way to write."

          A possible cancer had taken me
          To the edge of my endurance. Pokeweed,
          Poisonous, became attractive. Red stems
          And juicy black berries. I had packed warm clothes
          And pain killers. Why the warm clothes if this
          Was to be my last walk? To die in comfort
          Without a fly’s buzz. Overlooking a ravine,
          Sea of mountains, dawn. But it proved a false alarm.
          Now Sunday will be a holy day of plant
          Identification. Nothing better
          Than lying in leaf litter, skin drying
          To a taut drum. Ravens stay away!
          Until cougar’s had his fill! Instead
          I showed the boys pokeweed growing among blackberries
          And taught them the differences and uses.

"Through a radical reduction in the number of signs, the alphabet simplified the scriptorial system in and of itself. The evolution of writing therefore may look like this: simple forms of counting preceded the complications of pictorial representation, which in turn led to simplification of the writing system in cultures that adopted the alphabet."

          I was running uphill, parallel to
          The Taconics extending northward into
          Vermont (I find Vermonters in their jalopies
          Annoying but admire them for planning
          To arrest the president for war crimes) when
          I happened upon a flock of cedar waxwings—
          Said to be a gentle and politic bird—
          Sharing—very orderly—dried frozen grapes
          On the vine. (Rose hips, buckthorn, ash, pokeweed.)
          I tried one, too, the two seeds in my mouth
          Keeping me company down the mountain.
          I see no downside whatsoever
          To compensating for global warming,
          Constructing the green energy economy.
          New inventions may facilitate
          Our transportation to other planets.
          Yesterday a young man, Barack Obama,
          Won Iowa. I’m hopeful he will
          Articulate an international vision,
          A world order in which each neighborhood’s
          Good as another. I have no particular
          Love for writers; they’re a dime a dozen.
          But so are chickadees and I love them!

"Discussing the power of inscriptions of number, Harris points out:"
'Counting is in its very essence magical, if any human practice at all is. For numbers are things no one has ever seen or heard or touched. Yet somehow they exist, and their existence can be confirmed in quite everyday terms by all kinds of humdrum procedures which allow mere mortals to agree beyond any shadow of a doubt as to ‘how many’ eggs there are in a basket or ‘how many’ loaves of bread on the table.'

          True, nature would be a stern, unforgiving
          Mistress too, and man is but her right hand
          Acting on her command. How cold! How hot!
          The individual doing what he loves or not.
          Trees and cities. Herons, hawks. What we fail
          To govern in ourselves, nature will.
          We caught the killer and his gorillas,
          Now let’s go home, let the “innocent” choose
          Up sides. A good thing was done but the tyrant
          Should’ve been undone through global governance.
          Writing is divination using rhymes
          And estimations. Words like mammals
          Come near your sleeping head. Last night I emerged
          From the hum of our refrigerator
          Under a hazy, phaseless moon. The peepers
          Were an exact expression of my happiness.

"Or, one might add, for how many stanzas there are in a poem, or lines in a stanza, or stresses, feet, or syllables in a line, or occurrences of particular syntactical or grammatical patterns, and so on. As every serious student of versification has always understood, versification is about counting language."

          5:30-6 write poetry,
          6-7 ****, shave and shower, stretch
          Then get dressed, 7-7:30
          Clean house, 7:30-8 drive to work
          8-6 work (except Monday and Friday
          Work 8-4, basketball 4-6)
          6-7 drive home, shop, help make dinner
          7-8 eat dinner, read paper,
          Watch McNeil-Lehrer News Hour,
          8-9 play trumpet, study plants, type poems
          9-10 watch TV Mon: Murphy, Cybil,
          Tues: Frazier, Grace, Wed: Roseanne, Ellen,
          Thurs: Seinfeld, Friends, Fri: go out to dinner,
          10-11 read, except Tues watch
          NYPD Blue, Fri: Friday Night Lights,
          11 sleep. I could send this to the networks,
          Get a gizmo in my box. I hope my
          Schedule won't be interrupted for war.
          My dentist asked had I seen this morning’s
          Press conference, didn’t it just scare the ****
          Out of you. I said your bill is what scares
          The **** out of me. But here I am, writing
          And the sphere’s still turning. Or should I say
          Burning. As long as you write one poem per day
          You’ve left a little litter in the world.

"The reason to write verse is less to score the voice than to imbue words with the magical quality of counting. That is why meter, or measure, is at the heart of debates over all verse forms, including free verse."

          Vigorous wind, voracious ocean,
          Many merciless hard frosts, hurricanes.
          The bed of a human, its smell and warmth
          36 teeth, 46 chromosomes, 2 feet, a loose dime,
          61 summers, some soot, some sand,
          Thunderstorms. I wake up to a lightning strike
          And my dream incinerates. When they say
          Life is but a dream, that’s what they mean.
          The writer working hard, telling the story
          Of what happened yesterday or yesteryear,
          A man’s born to a country not his choosing,
          Let labor flow like capital, of mere being!
          Pomegranate juice, broccoli, arugula,
          Brussel sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower,
          Collard greens, kale, radishes, turnips,
          Garlic, leeks, scallions, onions, 2 lbs
          Swordfish, tomatoes (8 medium),
          3 cups almonds, carrots, a sweet potato,
          Winter squash, cantaloupe, mangoes, watermelon.
          2 daily writing exercises,
          50 words on any subject: complaint, headache.
          The imagination applies a
          Countervailing pressure to reality.
          Writing badly is the best revenge.

"Number is one of the creative grounds of poetry, and the idea that writing grew out of counting is the missing link in studies of the graphic in versification. It is almost uncanny that lines of verse look exactly like the most primitive ways of counting–parallel scorings that can be numbered."

          What you do to one side of the equation
          You gotta do to the other. Isolate
          The variable. Combine like terms. Metaphors
          And analogs are reduced to least common
          Denominators. Multiply through (parentheses).
          Write a new equation after each operation.
          Inscribe neatly. Check your work. Imagine
          That if you’re wrong, the astronauts burn.
          Change the signs which will avoid going
          The wrong way down the number line. Zero
          Is the middle of your universe.
          There it is, calm, comfortable as an egg
          On a spoon. That is, before possibilities
          Become probabilities. This is just
          Another equation manipulated
          With opposable digits. For at the ends
          Of your guns is the earliest calculator
          A magical machine which converts
          Numbers to words and words to numbers,
          Measures the mists, frequency and wavelength,
          Of the material penumbra.

"Verses are countable in exactly the way that token-iterative digits are countable, from either end of the sequence. Each one indicates only its singularity, not a number. Every poem in lines effaces, or predates, the distinction between writing and drawing in the same way as the lines on the Ishango bone."
www.ronnowpoetry.com

--Rothman, David, "Verse, Prose, Speech, Counting, and the Problem of Graphic Order," Versification, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 21, 1997
--Harris, Roy, The Origin of Writing, Open Court Publishing Co., 1986.
Will you help?

Or you need the world only for yourself!

Then you needn't heed the warning bells,
Sparrows are vanishing, so are squirrels,
Water hens and coucals are almost gone
But you don't need them you wannabe alone.
It's such a small thing disappearance of a bird
Tiger is vanishing, not far is leopard,
It doesn't matter let your tribe grow
Let them perish the thylacine and dodo.
You can live alone so what for the howl,
You need no drongo no nightjar no owl,
Rhinos are butchered, gorillas only a few
Not the wild ***** must survive is you.
You must alone rule with tooth and claw
Let them all go the eagles and macaw
The otter, the cheetah and the polar bear
You needn't think till they're there.

Then when they go it'll be too late
To know on their survival depends your fate
Even the smallest one lends you their help
But you needed the world only for yourself.
Ralph Corke Nov 2013
It’s inherent, a ritual passed through ages, fashions change but the outcomes the same. We make ourselves desirable, attractive. We plump out our manes and puff our collars, rouge our cheeks and lips, blood pumping to all our organs. It’s our tribal wear. We soak up sweet alcoholic nectar, loosening our inhibitions and bringing out our inner basic urges.



We hit a club called the watering hole, gorillas on the door filtering out the runts. My paws stick to the floor and the walls drip with sweat. The disco lights burn down on me with a heat like the desert. You can’t move without making eye contact with someone. Single men lean against the walls, and lurk in the shallows like alligators. Waiting for a young philly to wonder past a little worse for wear. Snap. Men dance with their tops off, sweat making their skin glisten like a serpent. The first thing you have to do is get to the bar, its packed and the bodies push against you as all trying to get to the front. The first few drinks numb you and make you confident, you begin to be seduced by the music and dance floor. The air is humid and the smell of smoke has faded away, just leaving the smell of body odour coming from the hippo taking up most of the dance floor. The main smell overpowering all this is ***, pure unfiltered ***, the place reeks of it. This place is a meat market, but there’s all kinds of animal on show. You’ve got your flamingos who stand there beautiful, looked at but not touch, you’ve also got your warthogs content rolling in their filth,  you’ve got your grizzly bears sniffing out the honey. Me I’m a hyena, (laugh) a pack animal, we hunt in small groups, dotted around the stage, causing mischief among the herd, we’re jokers, entertainers, it might all look like a laugh but cross one of us and feel our bite which is certainly worse than our bark.

There’s one though, he’s a lion, king of the beasts, everything else is just meat, he locks onto his target, he stealthy crosses the dance floor to prey on it, there’s plenty of meat around but that’s the one he wants, it’s a game, we lock eyes, I can’t move, it’s survival of the species, and he’s top of the food chain. Once he has me he takes his fill and leaves me to the vultures.

I lick my wounds to start again. And then I realise the hunter has become the hunted.
Matalie Niller Sep 2012
Got a problem?
I can make thousands
millions
all up in the ceiling
mosaic tiles
blue and gold
holding down the albums
memories so soft and sweet
buttercream to wisdom teeth
picking out the files with an ax
and you can ask
any fella on the street
what he thinks
he'll say he doesn't,
we're honest by nature
nomenclature
soggy,
**** sapiens forever
loving bones and gorillas
never feel ya
quite the same
as that time in the attic
with the static
in our brains
it was insane
the way we thought our thoughts
touched touches
with more
would have scored
had it not been for the spiders-
frisky little things
squashed em long ago
and that's why they don't have wings,
unnecessary condition
apparitions to trife
made a foxy wolf lick his chops
take Peggy for a wife.
Mateuš Conrad Jul 2016
.of all days, but esp. a day such as this,
so little must happen,
  but at the same time so much can happen,
and it did, later in the day i watched
the magic at wimbledon: cori "coco" gauff
went into the 4th round -
     clinging on to reply with 2 match
points against her...
    coming back in a tie break in the 2nd
set, winning the 3rd 7 - 5...
    and... as ever, of all the grand slams in
tennis... wimbledon is always packed...
fancy seeing a full crowd at either the u.s.
open or roland garose...
   which makes for ****** viewing...
you really do need the crowd there,
the commentary doesn't really matter when
the crowd is there: the crowd and subsequently
the atmosphere... which is a delight
for t.v. viewing...
       but prior?
               the unadulterated pleasure from
physical labour... notably gardening in this example...
mawing the lawn...
  and then cutting down my grape vine:
poor ****** died somehow...
  many a good bottles of wine it did provide...
i'll miss making my own wine...
              but more importantly...
a rekindled sensation i once associated with
physical labour...
   after the work was done...
to sit, smoke a cigarette, have 3 sips of coffee...
and just feel a full-embodiment
without any necessities of thinking,
of the mind,
    to have invested so much much in the body
and so little in the mind...
   physical labour has to be the most
gratifying aspect of life:
    i'm jealous of the men in trades where
physical labour is required...
   how they can block thinking,
while perfecting their physical deeds...
an act of physical labour eventually outstrips
any gratification from that mollusc
    slouch into intellectualism:
esp. if there is no worthy opponent and you're
performing "intellectual" deeds solo...
what permeates from physical of labour
is a clarity of mind,
   esp. in the realm of horticulture...
       but i remember it was the same after
an honest day's work on a construction site...
there is no superior feeling:
not even during or after ***...
                           the body disavows the mind,
it disallows any bothersome minor existential
crisis to enter the foray of man's immediate
circumstance...
    almost all "intellectual" excursions can be
so ****... unsatisfying -
                   it would appear that physical
labour is more rewarding than any
intellectual "labour"...
                         since after the work is done...
both the body and the mind rest...
     unlike the opposite:
         where the body is perhaps at rest,
but the mind continues its "perverted"
                         distaste for a sense of completeness
and its furthered inability to sway
away from prodding abstracts or concrete
observations;
shame about the grape vine...
     making your own wine is probably
the most rewarding part of life -
   well... it was for me.


what made the Freudian question more penetrable is
what made it obvious - asking the same question
whether a housewife needed a kettle
was like asking a bricklayer for trowel -
only the rich payed for the meaning
of dreams... ****... the poor were just given
the fact that, we do, actually dream -
unless it's some over-worldliness or
exacting the unconsciousness of the heart
keeping rhythm to the brain's break from
thinking in the cranium cinema -
ah yes, hierarchy; hierarchy hierarchy hierarchy,
no Saddam Hussein then to bother?
ah ****, there was. too bad, make more mistakes,
that'll be a fine excuse for being human,
given the fact that when waiters make mistakes
we turn blue with rage and call for a happy meal -
i don't know what women want,
and to be honest, i don't care -
if a house is an extension of a woman i already know
the perks of wants presupposed -
man wants sea, Norse, man wants desert, Arab -
there's nothing worth noting for him to
simply settle down and watch television or
become a gamer - there are dinosaurs about with
that theory - beware.
Big Benjamin will be hushed for a year -
just recently renamed Tower E -
but what's that? glory be to Darwin in the highest?
championing Darwinism to simply speak
a valid point will make art suffer -
it's not longer Charles II with a cravat but
fur - plus it's impossible to start from there,
better to start from a deviation like from ****** into
wholehearted matrimony - choose a negative and
improve on it, why bother a positive chimp variation?
what progress comes from that? Gorillas aren't exactly
harassed by felines in the thick jungle, or if they are,
no more than Africa-Americans in their own cars
without guns but with gun permits - which means that
Americans are more likely to own gun permits than
passports, forget the fables of ***** Dancing and
the hopes of a Roman Holiday... it's Iowa-time right now...
gonna get smaller by the day -
existence via the bungalow - and a society where there's
a friction concerning not-having-read-philosophy
and having-read-philosophy, but it won't change for either
faction, both will be diagnosed as mad for the sake of
leisure activities continuing and pharma selling.
Denmark will flourish and Iceland and
what Darwinist scientists should have concentrated on:
shorter time-frame, evolution of Scandinavians -
what the Chinese already done and the Blue Indians tilting
the earth's gravity east with their 'made in China' #madeinchina...
but in a country that regards reading Kierkegaard
as allocating the diagnosis of schizophrenia...
you beg to differ and turn dialectics into warring -
this is England 2016 - by god man, don't read
books! read seagulls regurgitating chip-mush via
the media! don't you read books in England! don't!
i warn you! and remember that the internet doesn't
exist for journalists, esp. those writing opinion pieces!
it's not reality for them (the content) - a computer is
real, but anything on it isn't - thank you very much
for the social aspect of the internet coupled with
globalisation and the non-existent village or neighbour -
thank you... it's just a defence mechanism,
the internet is without authority - the printed press
has authority looming over it - the best time to write
a load of ******* not bothersome about money.

p.s. i hate the argument from the perspective
of exercise... i see exercise as pointless...
working, doing something, goal orientation
within the confines of one organism to another,
losing weight is such a vain goal /
purpose to execrise and all that scientific jargon
about releasing your... this receptor,
that receptor, this chemical that chemica...
*******...
     mawing the lawn and cutting a grape vine...
exercise... but more importantly:
a very organic end goal
.
Olivia Kent Nov 2013
Jenny and the Great Ape!

Was only when watching T.V.
Watched the kindness of eye surgery.
Rebuilding a future of vision.
Bright and true.
Cataract removal.
Taken in care.
Helped persons from sub-continent.
Once sight deprived.

Then from the depths of my mind.
A wonderful achievement.
From my memory.
Surgeon of human form.
Enhanced the eyes.
Of apes and men.
Not mice and men.
That would be far too much of a crazy feat

However:
The visual improvement of gorillas eyes.
Cataracts removed.
Lenses replaced.
One magical gift.
The ability to fix.


By ladylivvi1

© 2013 ladylivvi1 (All rights reserved)
This is a true story converted into a poem. A surgeon colleague of mine performed eye surgery on a gorilla to enable it live independently! Amazing....for confidentiality I am unable to give name of the surgeon. Such a gift!
a m a n d a Oct 2013
lend me your ears
and i will tell you a story

there are truly monstrous
little creatures
running about
WITH TOO MANY ******* LEGS

one night
one of these monsters
revealed itself
to the terror
of its human onlooker

let me explain terror
in this instance
it is a feeling that may or may not
cause one
to literally tear one's clothes off
put on uninfested clothes
and flee the premises

and i mean flee

now i'm not saying
i know someone who would do this
but i heard this story
of a woman
that, in a state of such terror
in a state of such
severe heebie jeebies
tore around town
and screamed "too many legs!"
out her rolled down windows

when this medicine did not
cure said
heebie jeebies
there was truly a sight and sound
to behold

now i'm not gonna lie
it was me, ok?
don't judge
because of this next part
i am very proud

i just sang
my ever loving
heart out
to a 10 mile radius
and i mean i
sang that ****

anyone who hadn't heard
"gorilla" by bruno mars

has now heard it.

and the energy i released
was profound
because i hit that note
*******:

I bet you never ever felt so good, so good
I got your body trembling like it should, it should
You'll never be the same baby once I'm done with you

You [3x]

the "you" is the crucial part
and i'm telling you
i just sang the **** out of that song
until i got dizzy
and my fists hurt from pounding the
steering wheel

it gave me enough courage
to re-enter the premises
pop a bottle
grab my laptop
(while doing a little dance of terror)
and jump on the couch

the only problem
is that if you
sing the **** out of "gorilla"
literally 25x
too many legs
becomes the least of your
problems

you realize
quite absurdly
how at the present moment
you are not
making love like gorillas
Your lifeline is going flat ✓\✓_viscious enemies
as I pull the plug of your nasty predatorial existence **** be the day your great grandparents were born.
✓✓\✓\✓______

Henry Robert Welonek you two timing ***** impotent ***** donor fool
your sterile butcher jealous Spectre nurse attacking anesthesized mother; cutting her mother injecting her brain with high long gage needles
kept for years to re-attack out of jealousy- ✓\✓__ugly stetile gorillas who spawned you!
You too Lizzz Welonek
your Arthur- Susan Raitano
trashing scapegoating lala sassy cocos mother drugging her grown kids pregnant with hallucinogens and metamphetamins!
assimilating my girls to butcher their intellect, heroic heart of gold
and unbelievable beauty.
May your heart stop beating now
✓\✓\✓\✓_
and go hell go.

Charalambos Mantalozis gaiduri
( dunky) ***** snake
cold in grave glad you don't breath:
baby torturer mfkr murderer .
your Kiriaki Madalozis 4 jealous baby poisoners envious shadow people
greedy Greek demons satan shines before your **** .
The Piraeus kalamatan 12 thugs
Human trafficking predators
GO FLAT lined DIE! **** of Earth
✓\✓\✓\✓_there won't be no trial.
I SEE RED butcher haters.
pepper spray you burning swords, knives in your gut better sleep with one eye open covert fools I am all you are never could be I succeeded where you failed.
Cheating ******* plotting butchering me pregnant I survived you in Mexico in Greece and in USA team of arrogant proud butchers!
Yes I am a surviver a witness to your nasty hate crimes.
✓\✓_
__
Those nasty doctors murderers for hire assassin's from corrupt LA,  CA!
I  see red executioner style.
On fire my flame sword on hand
straight to your heart and brain. Elizabeth Welonek Gumnedin your impostor
Fraudulent birth certificate go to hell,my children aren't dogs to be sold to bail you out if ******* dues!  
Your life line is going flat flat flat
don't blame me here I learned from you
and my new name is JUSTICE.
°°°°°°°°
As for you my first love jpcrdd
you could have asked me questions where I've been who had kidnapped me!
Given me your heart diamond ring in your coat pocket.
You ran to your greedy lover crawling for you.
I wish you nothing bad I still love you.
You had my best interest tried to save me from this hell I still need your protection don't forget
your one piece of golden heart
holds me dear as you promised.
The world will pass
but not your word.
Save my children please or
Build me a home your heart is
my last card you're generous
to a fault the wolves howl
in this homeless jungle
I am no longer Jane
I got a name- JUSTICE
please help me.
~~~~~
Mr and Mrs Andrews
with Karijinbba
https://youtu.be/PrnOcI-s_fU
Different is synonymous with undesirable
An egg hatched by the wrong bird
The story of an ugly duckling
Ugly because he is difference

Environment defines what is attractive
A monkey in a gorillas cage will seem weak
Even a lion amongst deer will be rejected
A diamond amongst plastic is an outcast

No matter how beautiful we are if we are in the wrong place we are ugly
To be where you do not belong is to always miss a home never known
A longing to be free from the bonds that keep us down

To leave, to run away into the darkness in hopes of a better future
To smart or to scared to give up what we have for an uncertainty
We struggle to grasp at straws when we seek to conquer all

A ugly mess today
A beautiful arrangement unseen
But tomorrow when none are left to mock
We stand seen immaculate, pristine in the light of freedom

Everyday a new chapter
With every chapter we are given the chance to end the book
Or we can write a story worth reading

— The End —