He was once a manic market monkey
Of the concrete London jungle,
His mask, in the creek of trickling time,
Slipped off slowly then did tumble
Layer by layer he shed his skin,
‘Til vulnerable and naked,
And there he grokked his cardinal sin;
That he sold his soul and faked it.
Now the ‘I’ in ‘him’ is lost
The ‘m’ too hard to find,
But if you breathe the ‘h’ enough
You might hear his hissing mind
Upon a roaring rock he clambers
His fingers crimped and gripped,
Or in a bustling ashram kitchen
Chewing chapati and curry dip
In undergrowth or canopy
He sings to bark and vine,
And moves into the ecstasy
Of the body’s dancing rhyme
Perhaps you’ll find him here or there
Perhaps you may never know him,
But if you read between these lines
You might find him in this poem.
The Philalethes 