A big baboon is a royal gent; a dog faced delinquent of a playful bent.
He’s a cunning, scheming, conniving shrew; a philanderer, a rapist and a bigot too.
While his fingers gentle and curious probe, his fancy’s fur and her ear lobe,
his eyes and his teeth are there to test, the jealous hopes of his second best.
Because for the younger male his days are grave; just the neutered watch of a wishful knave.
He sits and scratches and waits and watches and plays with himself on the lower branches.
He sits and waits because it is in the nature of life that the king will falter and fall to the knife.
As a tree falls, new light imparts a scramble, ‘tween sapling, sibling, weed and bramble.
It’s because nature decrees a life brief for the strong that they receive such bounty that cannot last long.
For the king has ladies that he might do at his leisure, or let them wait for their moment of pleasure,
for they are his all and he does not share, or lend to those for whom he does not care.
In children he is rich, and with many to come, for he’s fond of his tribe although he frightens some.
You see a baby boon, although a wayward blighter, is an unusually cheerful little freedom fighter.
He’s a man in the making and a king in disguise, a criminal in waiting for men to despise.
So under cascades of green and through scaffolds of light, his little boys forage while his big boys fight.
His little girls shriek and play with their tails, or groom each other with their long finger nails.
Thus Eden exists in not caring still, what is above and beyond or just over the hill.
That there was nothing before and there will be nothing again, bothers not for a moment a small monkey’s brain. Because it’s hard to distinguish in the rhythm of life, a past and futureless moment of strife. To in nature behold and in nature perceive; once in nature to die as from nature receive.
Our big king is bold and entertains no scorn and knows not that he will die just as sure as he’s born.
……for the forest is a mother whose children are many, some come, some go, some steal for a penny.
This thief of deception is not the king himself, but the man/beast who walks and stalks for his wealth.
This trader of meat and death and despair, is not like a primate all covered in hair.
He’s naked and vile and cunning to boot, and he tracks and dissolves and then emerges to shoot.
His wires and tangles and mirages and things, confound the barefooted to trap them in rings.
Who can say what he’s thinking as he knots up his snare, for he’s hungry with malice and weak with despair. His own life is blighted by wrongs he has done, by souls he has stolen when himself he had none.
It’s coin he desires but it’s pity he needs, for it’s food to his children that his bloody hand feeds.
Mankind will trespass over laws of the field, as they twist and distort and compel earth to yield.
Of fern and flesh, of finger and bone, of steel and hammer, of gunshot and stone.
A man made wire turned into a noose can detain both an elephant or a meekly mongoose.
Our man cares not which for he is quick to delight, so long as his victim puts up not a fight.
A duiker, a bushbuck, a pig or a roan, none but a boon in a bush-trap can make our man groan.
The dog man of the bush is a terrible victim, in a seething, ferocious and desperate affliction. Neither blade nor cudgel, poison or fire, can cow or impress a boon bound up in wire. No power on earth can stamp on his plight, an agreement to die without a terrible fight.
The human he knows this and considers the notion, that a man does not eat of his brother’s commotion.
So he leaves to the forest and the breath of the sky, the screams and dementia of a creature to die.
Then the cold wire sinks deep into the flesh of the boon, but not in a way by which death will come soon.
No easement or mercy can the king expect, nor by his might and authority his horrors deflect. The young brutes are sombre, as they brood over each other, for contests will brew as they select out another. The king’s hourglass has turned and his sands are near done, like the roll of the earth and the set of the sun.
As the forest turns quiet on this cold afternoon, as it’s shadows yawn deeply and darken too soon,
the old boon falls silent with his hand tightly wound, by a wire to a sapling securely bound.
A few of the troop still stay alongside him, but most have now wandered to roost and deride him.
The young ones are shrieking in quarrels and ruptures while the big ones are amending their own power structures. The evening commotion goes on despite, the one who will die in the forest that night.
It is mothers who linger and fuss for a while, staying on-hand perhaps in their mode of denial, but they have baby’s to feed and beds to select, and a dead man is anyway hard to protect.
So when the last of his kin have melted away; when a silence profound over the forest holds sway; when all hope is vapour and the moment has come; when the last instance of daylight has followed the sun; when the moon rises up in a clear silver sky, the king is impressed now by his right to die.