The wire-frame monkey tells the
threefold tale of a nation driven
to its knees by the weight of
a hundred years of torture,
a people conditioned to
rebel against the
instincts
that
kept us whole,
kept us together,
until starved of all
sustenance we imprinted
on the chemical scalpels added
to our daily feeding by academic
experts who neatly sliced
through our natural
reticence and
straight
into
our
brains,
cutting away
right from wrong
and washing us clean
of the sin of rebellious
bloodshed with esoterica
our wise forefathers would
have scrubbed clean with fire,
branding us with hypodermic
needles shaped like puzzle
pieces designed to
unlock the poison
of doubt,
drip
drip
into thoughts
long scrubbed of
conviction we foolishly
dismissed as superstition
-- You must trust us because you
can no longer trust yourselves! --
and the monkey's eyes were met
by steel alone, disconnected
from its race as we have
become disconnected
from our race, and
when
the
conductor
lifted his wand and
the curtain rose, the stage
was set for a second
toxic inoculation,
and the worst
of all
-- Look! --
and we looked and our senses
were overwhelmed, shocked,
and we clung to one another,
our innocence stripped away
by the time-dilated eyes
of the monkey,
and
the
megalomanics
bombarded us with
unholy comparisons
-- See what you are! See what your
people have always been! See how
worthless! See how degraded! --
and we pulled the cord ourselves,
strangling, severing body from
spirit, a hard lesson in slavery
-- Trust us! Trust us! --
and the claws slid into the gloves
and the third catalyst settled
into its grave, taking with it
all that had been
bequeathed
to
us
over
countless
millennia and,
bled dry, we suckled on each
substitution offered by the parasites
-- substitute labor, substitute homes,
substitute families, substitute
offspring --
and now we wait, calmly, sedately,
at the mouth of the chute for the
stick that will drive us
uncomplaining
into
the
grinding
gears of the machine,
forgotten fodder, we
-- poor monkeys! --
poor monkeys without even a
wire-frame mother to soothe
us with a metal teat, unable
to grieve a catastrophic
loss we can't
remember,
and
raised
to embrace
an aseptic sterility,
we turn blind eyes to
a glass bulb and we weep,
we weep.
August 27, 2026
