hillwalker
11-28-2011, 03:13 PM
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG SIMIAN
(with abject apologies to J Joyce and Dylan Thomas)
once a time upon it was a very good time time; a good time gone before my memory began and I been inside this place though sometimes when I taste an older memory there are other places hot with heat and other kinds of green and buzzy flies and sounds of chattery birds all in the air…
there’s an outside place surrounding me just like any other place I’ve ever been with plenty stuff they give us all to eat and wet stuff there an there and sometimes they put me inside their memory place and jab my skin, take out my red stuff, eyes inside my mouth, and hairless fingers they all seem to have in every place you can imagine; hot cold hot inside a kind of hurting feel but not that really feeling hurt but at the same time…
incidentally
don’t even ask me where I got this language from as it’s purely a device allowing me to talk to you in words you understand, you understand…
I’m easily bored, you’d probably say, short strings of memory stretched out like tightening wire and sparking colours and swelling noise and smellings then I feel a spurt of short attention span that swings me up into the warm air high from branch to branch where all the coloured world unswirls then curls me up inside the wall of that old tyre
swinging
and I’m swung out on that swinging tyre, and when I look in right through it there’s another world framed tight that side of it that’s just the same as this one left out here…
another day my lazy mind is latched on to a bit of rope tied to a rubber ball and I can throw it - even catch it - and so many different ways…
and on another day the young female comes up to us smelling of ripe and in heat, yellowshine hair and metal eyes, and that human haze of body tastes mixed up with something else like flower shapes but hiding behind thorny spikes and creepling leaves and twistly fingers…
she puts over one of those black sticks into my food fingers, food wanting fingers, the kind of black sticks that leave markings when you rub them on a branch and taste of something burny burnt that make your lips curl back and there’s sheets and sheets of the white I see everywhere; usually wearings for what the watchers eat before ending up in those hungry grey shapes where they put left-overs to keep, but they don’t keep, of course, so someone ends up taking them away
eventually
but not before they start to smelling right across our paddock…
and she’s also brought me some yellowy that tastes of bananas so I choose to interact while she stands there outside my cage
and next thing I know she’s holding up her sheet of white and she’s marked a shape on it that could be me: two eyes high on the face and my splayed nose, so now I take the hint,
eventually,
but soon as I hold up my bit of white, pushing it to her face, she snatches it and moves her legs fast back into that other memory place…
and I forget the rest…
- What’s that he’s drawn? Just sets of straight lines?
- Like tall reeds of grass do you think, like at the jungle’s edge?
- But he’s captive born so how could he remember something that he’s never seen?
- So maybe it’s a genetic memory, or even some kind of counting, five lines equals five fingers? Like on my hand?
- So is he tryin’ to show us he can count do you think?
- Could be. Or what about some kind of alphabet? Because some of these lines are shorter than the others.
- Maybe…
or may not be
because ultimately when I focus back on my surroundings, toss the yellowy skins into the weeds I start to shake them bars again and shake them bars again…
H
By request - an ancient piece of dross...
(with abject apologies to J Joyce and Dylan Thomas)
once a time upon it was a very good time time; a good time gone before my memory began and I been inside this place though sometimes when I taste an older memory there are other places hot with heat and other kinds of green and buzzy flies and sounds of chattery birds all in the air…
there’s an outside place surrounding me just like any other place I’ve ever been with plenty stuff they give us all to eat and wet stuff there an there and sometimes they put me inside their memory place and jab my skin, take out my red stuff, eyes inside my mouth, and hairless fingers they all seem to have in every place you can imagine; hot cold hot inside a kind of hurting feel but not that really feeling hurt but at the same time…
incidentally
don’t even ask me where I got this language from as it’s purely a device allowing me to talk to you in words you understand, you understand…
I’m easily bored, you’d probably say, short strings of memory stretched out like tightening wire and sparking colours and swelling noise and smellings then I feel a spurt of short attention span that swings me up into the warm air high from branch to branch where all the coloured world unswirls then curls me up inside the wall of that old tyre
swinging
and I’m swung out on that swinging tyre, and when I look in right through it there’s another world framed tight that side of it that’s just the same as this one left out here…
another day my lazy mind is latched on to a bit of rope tied to a rubber ball and I can throw it - even catch it - and so many different ways…
and on another day the young female comes up to us smelling of ripe and in heat, yellowshine hair and metal eyes, and that human haze of body tastes mixed up with something else like flower shapes but hiding behind thorny spikes and creepling leaves and twistly fingers…
she puts over one of those black sticks into my food fingers, food wanting fingers, the kind of black sticks that leave markings when you rub them on a branch and taste of something burny burnt that make your lips curl back and there’s sheets and sheets of the white I see everywhere; usually wearings for what the watchers eat before ending up in those hungry grey shapes where they put left-overs to keep, but they don’t keep, of course, so someone ends up taking them away
eventually
but not before they start to smelling right across our paddock…
and she’s also brought me some yellowy that tastes of bananas so I choose to interact while she stands there outside my cage
and next thing I know she’s holding up her sheet of white and she’s marked a shape on it that could be me: two eyes high on the face and my splayed nose, so now I take the hint,
eventually,
but soon as I hold up my bit of white, pushing it to her face, she snatches it and moves her legs fast back into that other memory place…
and I forget the rest…
- What’s that he’s drawn? Just sets of straight lines?
- Like tall reeds of grass do you think, like at the jungle’s edge?
- But he’s captive born so how could he remember something that he’s never seen?
- So maybe it’s a genetic memory, or even some kind of counting, five lines equals five fingers? Like on my hand?
- So is he tryin’ to show us he can count do you think?
- Could be. Or what about some kind of alphabet? Because some of these lines are shorter than the others.
- Maybe…
or may not be
because ultimately when I focus back on my surroundings, toss the yellowy skins into the weeds I start to shake them bars again and shake them bars again…
H
By request - an ancient piece of dross...