Homo floresiensis
By S. Lippek

         (for Tony Matelli)


When our tails began to wither, fear bloomed among us.
The first one dropped off, and we drove the tail-less beast
from our company. We hurled stones and sticks until she fell,

whimpering, and then limped off to bleed somewhere hidden.
But soon enough, we each had a turn: waking in the starlight
with an itching stump, then a numbness, where there should have been

a pain. The tails were gone. Knowing what I know now,
I would have stuck to the trees, left our useless tools to rot in the understory.
Chisels, we had none. Brushes we had, the chewed

and fraying ends of certain branches. But no ink.
And nothing to write down, anyway. We ate poison berries
and saw visions, luminous new colors, shapes

we did not understand. We didn't know what it all meant.
Lacking the bluff precision of your confident dictionaries,
our soft categories were baggy, shapeless things that could stretch

to hold anything at all. Mushrooms, birthmarks, clouds, all
clumped together. Why not. Water was not a metaphor
for clarity. Water was muddy – muddy as blood,

those bloody waters, some days. We never bothered
to count the little fingers or slap their backs if they didn't breathe.
If we already had one too many, we took it to the river and heaved it in,

and then kept on drinking the water, right there, right where
we threw the empties. We didn't know. We would be the ones
who licked the glowing watchfaces, who painted

with phosphorescence from the factory, never connecting
that the buboes rose up in the same patterns later.
We would be the children who didn't learn the word "hot"

quite fast enough. Our trials ended in errors too often. Bad luck.
We never got taller, never put on white coats, never invented
fancy names for every fiddly little piece of our bodies.

Now my brown bones, glossy with preservatives
lay bathed in light, brighter and whiter, even, than the young sun
I knew in life. Among you tall ones, you dressed ones,

my slim femur wouldn't even be adequate
as a club, not against your round, clean heads.
O makers of arks and salvers, O you casket-decorators,

anoint my bones with your softest brushes.
Affix to them white labels. Put my family in order, and
give us names. You know how to save the living, where to leave the dead.
You know how to tell the difference.

S. Lippek was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, and has recently resided in Brooklyn and Budapest. Lippek's writing has appeared in art zines, local and internationalist policy papers, heavy metal fan mags, alt-newsweeklies, letters to editors and judges, a transmission arts textbook, a medical journal, and many other places in the concrete and virtual worlds.

© 2008 prickofthespindle.com