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Once Upon a Time: Stories & Poems of the Dharma
Spring 2013   Vol. 29 #2
Spring 2013   Vol. 29 #2

Poems/Not Poems

Monkey Mind

By Steve Kanji Ruhl

 
 

 

maybe rhesus, maybe wooly

monkey leaping vine

to tortuous vine

inside the cortex

 

 

chittering

like a fishwife

scold

in billingsgate

 

 

maybe a gueron

monkey in the brain’s

arbor

of branching dendrites,

prehensile and hanging

 

 

by tail

downside-up,

gibbering

like a bedlam

halfwit,

maybe a howler

 

 

monkey shrieking

through cerebral

jungles of neurons, maybe

capuchin or ring-tail

 

 

monkey enamored

of racket,

maybe a spider

monkey

 

 

spitting seeds

of ideas, scratching

and tumbling

through my head,

furry adrenaline-pumped

olympian,

 

 

maybe proboscis

or trunk-monkey

loudly protesting

confinement

in the skull’s

littered cage, its tail

thrashing—

 

 

sometimes the monkey-house

din, sometimes the brain’s

primate roar,

its rainforest chatter

 

till I inhale,

 

exhale:

 

monkey

 

hush
now.

 

 

∞

 

From the “Online Exclusives” for the Spring 2013 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 29, No. 2)
© 2013 Steve Kanji Ruhl

Author

Steve Kanji Ruhl is the author of No Bread Without the Dance and Dead Lift. He is a Dharma Holder at Green River Zen Center, Montague, Massachusetts.

Author

Steve Kanji Ruhl is the author of No Bread Without the Dance and Dead Lift. He is a Dharma Holder at Green River Zen Center, Montague, Massachusetts.

 
 
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