TARZAN TRIPS FOREVER

Mad hippie, stone hallucination, his foot tests
the branch before he plunges forward, the forest
flashing, his diving arc like a geometric sign
from Heaven, the clamor of hundreds of free apes
like a storm in the treetops, the distance too high,
the water too shallow, the knife's glint a bright point.

Meanwhile, a sly species pack a point on a point
in an ocean of darkmatter. Atomic tests,
religion, and everything that brought them up high
and conceited above the rest of the forest
have left the billions of fidgeting furless apes
scratching their fretful backsides in search of God-sign,

examining waves, roots, a plus or minus sign,
and finding peace in placing the decimal point
in just the right place. They're a mass of surplus apes
who've found creation, evolution, and stress tests.
Long concrete veldts cut through their remaining forest
on a breadboard world with a satellite high.

Shaded by ancient trees towering stories high,
the one perfect man is bent low, sniffing lion sign,
finding strength and purpose in the primal forest,
gauging the warmth of urine, the way claw marks point.
He reads English but speaks French; thus his author tests
one's belief in a paper world of noble apes.

What would this Mars historian know of kings or apes?
Yet his pulp rushes through me like an acid high.
The drums. The lion. How odd Fiction is, how it tests
the mind to see Greystoke tracking Jane's subtle sign;
wearing a black business suit and making a point
of soaring through some burning Georgia pine forest.

Strange, too, is Truth's package of profit and forest:
Here a mechanized cheetah teases tribes of apes
into throwing rocks (expressly proving a point).
Here monkey clans live gladly ever after, high
in the Everglades just beyond a rusted sign,
watching 'gators and o-ring temperature tests.

Here the Jane Goodalls linger in the forest, high
on life, while diaper-donning apes eat burgers, sign
like caged gurus, and point at trees in IQ tests.