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