Metaphysics and the Monkey

The monkey climbing down the Mayan megalith
knows nothing of the powers in the stone,
what a being must believe to carve it so,
how a carving may breed faith in flesh and bone.

He's looking down and back across his shoulder,
searching for the safety of the ground.
There's fear etched in those eyes. Anxiety
Why did he ever try to climb
this chunk of God-knows-what-with-nothing-to-hang-on-to,
this bald and bony rock that's nowhere like a tree?
Unclimbable, that's what!   
He's sure he'll tumble off it soon enough
into some purgatory.       
But now look carefully,       there's something else:
there's sorrow in the eyes at having left
his comfort zone, his loving home.       His tall tree 
is a memory.       Its canopy, his warm and cosy wife --
both figments from a dream. 
The sadness comforts fear. Sadness and fear.
And something else again,
something that we humans know as prayer.
Prayer offered in extremity. 

Like all best heavenly communions, 
his cry is silent. Wordless. Imageless. A mystery at source.
A lifting of the soul to God or to the void.
Translated though, it roughly goes like this:

Please let the world be tree-like underneath,
not flakey like the croissants humans eat
(discarding lives like sun-burnt flakes of skin --
a psoriasis afflicting everywhere I look),
but let us live like ancient trees,
forever deeper in the earth and closer to
yourself above the sky --
                    And let it be like this for all --
not simply the elect.      
And then, please let
the limestone penis on that fabled bird 
one step or so below me, thin
and convoluted, interwoven with a snake, 
support my foot... my body-weight... my life... my all --
my afterlife, if that's to be --  and whatsoever
might come jogging after that. Here ends my prayer.

It ends with life's original hypothesis. He has two choices. 
Always there are two and only two. (The world 
is simple at its core.)
He knows the great philosophers by heart:-
Something either is, or it is not. (that's Socrates)
Branch will hold you, dear, or if it won't,it won't.(Aunt Flo')

No more ado. A single monkey-weight transferred
from dragon's tongue to cock of fabled bird.

Dendrites in his brain light up
like street lamp filaments
illuminating neural pathways
mapping those in the real world.
And as with all such modelling, such calculating,
testing, forging of new links, new phrases come
(wordless again) (and imageless) (half-formed) (unformed) 
into the Holiest of Holies in his mind 
                             (where even he 
has never dared to look) (but where 
he's forced to meet them now, 
                        these alien perturbations, 
ruffles to his natural rhythms),       oddities      like: - 
world is:-    locust on a strawberry 
              inside a lotus blossom
              in a dented can of butter beans.
The label reads: "Made Somewhere Else."
                                                                                      Or: -
world is jungle-friendly path of broken glass. 
                                 Anomalous ideas 
to conjure with      
like:      world is 
sun-dried purple roasted peanuts wrapped in haggis (which
in common with the rest of us, he's never known
but just concocted in some kitchen of his brain).       
Or: -
world is pollen clouds above the canopy.       
Or: -
(coming down to earth and walking on the canopy),
 a trapdoor made of mould, with
a deep pit beneath.      
Or: -
world is root canals in mud and slime 
and sound of sap a'roaring in the roots
                               like water at the falls. -- 

But these are insights he could never own 
or formulate.
He smells them out, like jungle smoke --
like irritations in the nose or throat,
an autonomic thing that happens to the mind.
Time to decamp the hippocampus says, that has
already struck more cells than anyone can count.

By-products all of life's involuntary 
mental exercises. 
              For example, this: what chance
the limestone penis carries all his weight 
for as long as he might take
to work out his next move?
(Or the next two) (Or three) (Or four) 
(How far ahead a monkey thinks, is hard to know.)

These are matters then, that occupy his mind,
that stretch his intellect. They are 
the metaphysics he has made his own.
And all the learning in his head
(which we can hardly know),
cannot quite grasp -- the way his fingers do --
the two millennia of culture in the stone.
.................................................................

This is a new poem offered to Poetry Pantry#133 at Poets United