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When Monkeys Learned to Write

it was such a novelty

everyone bought their books

which were mostly children’s stories

about bananas or climbing trees

 

but soon serious themes emerged

like capture in the jungle,

loss of freedom,

honest hunger to go home.

 

Trainers, worried about loss of income,

scolded, withheld food, hit,

silenced and ignored them

but there was no going back.

 

An ambitious chimp named Caravaggio

doing Internet research

shuddered with horror

then stunned the world with an editorial

 

about 1932 Detroit, when,

according to Steve Cummings’

California Progress Report 13 November 2008,

“the city shut down its zoo and slaughtered its animals

 to provide food for a starving population.”

 

After that, Caravaggio, like India’s master weavers,

had his thumbs cut off

but he stared into space in his corner

like he knew something we didn’t.

 

Scott T. Starbuck's 90-page activist poetry book Industrial Oz is forthcoming from Fomite Press in Vermont.  He was a 2014 Friends of William Stafford Scholar at the "Speak Truth to Power" Fellowship of Reconciliation Seabeck Conference, and a 2013 Artsmith Fellow on Orcas Island.  His "Manifesto from Poet on a Dying Planet" is at Split Rock Review < http://www.splitrockreview.org/news/2014/9/1/contributor-spotlight-scott-t-starbuck >.

Scott T. Starbuck

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