silverback feral poet in a box

Sometimes I look at the world through the eyes of the jogger in "Manhunter" - the one who was mistaken for the serial killer in an FBI ambush. As a small army surrounds him, his adrenaline pounding, he turns to a police officer and asks "Why are you moving in slow motion?"

So often the world seems exactly to be set on a slower clock than I, as if I vibrate at 120 cycles, while it is doing 40...it is frustrating. Part of this issue was resolved when I lived in LA...that city comes at you like rabid ferrets, constantly on the attack...maybe I wasn't this way before then and it shifted me into permanent overdrive. I just know that now the days, the hours, the moments drag by while I impatiently wait for the worms.

I feel like I am in a cage. I am not a housepet or a zoo animal by nature. Never have been, never will be. I don't pose well, or often. I am aggravated by inactivity, and that point of stagnation that most seem to confront by my age never seems to have arrived, at least not to my perception. That point where you give up, give out, give in to the inevitable. I smell the night on the wnd, everyday, I barter with death under my breath, but I am not ready or willing to cede my sentience to the next realm. Not yet (like I will ultimately have much say over this?)

Sigh. Just thought I heard a car door. Perhaps some unexpected (or expected) diversion. No such luck, it was down the block.

I feel like the silverback gorilla I saw at the great ape exhibit at the Natonal Zoo several years ago. Tourists were five deep up against the plexiglass, making faces, snapping pictures, hooting and howling as he sat, his back to them, as if shielding his family from the crowd's frightening antics. Once in a while he would turn and frown, a sad frown, as if uncomprehending as to why he would be in a box, and such creatures as we would be let to roam free.

It was a sorrowful sight, the sort that sometimes makes me wonder why, when we at the top of the pyramid here on Earth are such self-absorbed, self-destructive, self-involved jackasses, why we would expect an alien race that is more advanced than us to be anything more than emotionally retarded killing machines.

Maybe the speculative fiction writers of pre-E.T. had it right.

From time to time I grip the bars of my cage and test them, each time with more resolve, with greater will...as if uncertain that I really want out, but knowing that I will go mad if left to rot much longer. It's eaither that or eat myself to death...they seem to have food around here, at least.

Grunt.