The Baboon King

 

Whether in clouds high overlooking a city

of busy intent

or

a cottage vast draped against the blue of ocean’s swell

of excess

or

a white palace sprinkled with the visages 

of old,

he stumbles and trips, rights himself, and insists he never lost his footing.

 

His tribe grins widely and they raise their fists and eyes

towards promised greatness as they cheer on

the Baboon King.

All the while the bumbling Simian whittles at their resurrected fervor

until it is parsed down into a sharpened thorn

that pieces the skin.

A single drop of red blood eats like battery acid

at the stars of our Fathers.

 

Strutting like a hairy jungle king 

whose fur is rotting,

he bangs his chest and echoes confusion into the darkness.

The rising storms and winds

scatter the shedding truths.

The Baboon King’s faithful ones twist their

brains and duck their heads under trembling feathers of gold,

and the hairy one struts as he feeds the fire and it glows with destruction.

He preens and dances and paws

at the waving stripes and the golden grains burning

and he colors the purple mountains black as death.

The Baboon King feeds nothing to his faithful

until they are a pile of starving shaking bones,

ghosts of what once was

and will never be again.

 

Somewhere in the city a baby cries,

a man dies, a woman weeps,

and dreams are turned to nightmares.

The high rise molders into unremembrance

The cottage vast slips into the rising seas

 and the palace crumbles to bitter stones.

And we forget and we forget and we forget…

 

 

Teri Adams

December 2017

revised June 2025