Not a Kingdom within a Kingdom

Let's workshop this bitch!

Not a Kingdom within a Kingdom

We continue to romanticize animals
in the wild. “To be like them! Swallowed
entirely in their environments, unheady, 
unalienated from their bodies, one 
with their instincts and the present, 
sealed in a Jedi flow-state, dancing 
through life never with two left feet 
(or ulcers or melancholy, for that matter).” 
And yet how often does our presumption, 
the same one that had Burroughs idealize 
“Africa” as the place to go to get more heart
in the head, as an anti-squareness salvation 
for overly-Apollonian overly-unsavage 
whites (tentative, constipated, pee-shy,
flabby, unresilent, fact-glutted, nail-biting
hunchbacks haunted by what they said
years ago; sickened by their own heartbeats;
dissociated from fiery passions, from native
vital energies, enough to go limp simply
from the worry that they might go limp)—
how often does that same presumption 
crumble! It crumbles beneath the visuals 
of our daily social-media scrolling
or of our daily workday commuting—
activities that, admittedly in our defense, 
we carry out too often on autopilot, 
where we are too slack and zoned-out 
(or, so we might say in the framework 
of the questionable presumption 
at hand, too “beastly”) to be expected 
to call into question that presumption. 

Think not only of the golden retriever 
clearly dreaming of yelp-and-kick horrors 
or of the raccoons, the coyotes, the cougars 
living, withdrawn, in their heads enough 
to gnaw away their own trapped legs after 
that hellish waiting period of weighing
whether to start what must be carried out—
even through bone—to the bitter end. 
Think of the bear cub overthinking 
the best path down the rocky slope 
to its mother, going this way but then 
coming back (aware—at low resolution,
yes—that going through one door entails 
the closing of others perhaps better). 
Think of the anxiety-riddled squirrel 
on our commute, at war with itself 
about crossing the street: too scared 
to face squarely, to admit fully, the reality 
of the metal monster rolling toward it. 
After several false starts (going forward 
and then back, psyching itself out 
like Frasier Crane on a bike), how often
it crosses at some self-defeating moment 
(spurred by faith, by a nascent prayer 
to survive)—some moment that spoils 
our own graceful dance (for those of us 
who take care at least not to run it over).

*This poem is unpublished

Painting: “Portrait of Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677)”