Monkey (3)
The night before the end
I Monkey, son of Monkey
Stand above the fog on the barren mountain
My last two tanks of oxygen on my back;
It's warm, even here,
A place famous for savage winters.
The way I look is up and out
The way I've always looked on clear nights
When the wind was sharpened by crystal skies.
I am the comprehending brain
I know the story of creation
The chemistry deep in Titan
The food chains in the oceans
The mutterings of trees and fungi under the earth
The calls of a thousand bird species
The first million prime numbers
The nature of every cell in the body
The pigments used by Leonardo, Michelangelo and Picasso
The soundprint of every note of Bach's Chaconne in D
The concordance of every word and phrase in every book ever published
The genetic and geographical origins of every ancestor of the entire world's population
Every atom of the smoke
And made and wielded huge machines
Built ships the size of pyramids
Drawn up the waters of the aquifers
And sent them down polluted to the sea
I have the power to destroy every living thing
That crawls and swims and flies from pole to pole -
I see, embrace, I comprehend
I am the monkey the damp little monkey
I have danced I have danced with fire in my brain -
But I cannot tell why we have let the glory of this world slip through our fingers
Cannot fathom this my clever mind
My haunting self my doppelganger
Standing silent in swirling shadows beside me
As the data scrolls across the whiteness of the clouds
That mass before the night falls.
Turning up the Heat
Here I am, a charred body lying in a chaos of fallen trees
That candled their brief glory
While the land caught its last breath.
How could I not have noticed?
The heat came first as a warm wind,
Faint traces of perfume, a southern caress
Strengthened as thresholds were crossed out at sea.
The rise engendered the vicious cycles
Tightening spirals of chaos
Scouring the ravaged land.
The wind danced with fire,
Wind and fire, the final reckoning.
Now in the night the spirits gather
Time stalls in the cold, the sky glitters
The world calms
Unperturbed by me, a charred body,
A piece of incidental damage,
An empty husk by the wayside.
Meanwhile, ah meanwhile, the universe hums on..
