Poem 303

Somewhat tongue in cheek, this was sparked by a few things – my angle lamp poised over my typewriter (start with what’s in front of you), an acquaintance at university who accompanied an anthropologist on a field trip into a recently opened up area of highlands in PNG and came back as the first white woman ever to contract a particular skin disease (which at the time I considered to constitute the last word in cool) and a documentary I saw about a PNG man preparing a massive pig-giving ceremony who always wore a t-shirt with Why Don’t We Do It In The Road? on it … 

… imagine this as emanating from the point of view of a fevered or otherwise altered individual who is increasingly losing their grip on both their geophysical location and cultural norms …

( I like the onomatopoeic monkey chatter of inter tribal warfare … )

Anthropology

is this an angle lamp 
                                           or an exotic tree?
is it night 
                   or day turned back under the leaves?
silence singing
                                 or the taut stretched net of insect song
see the aluminium bird
                                                scratch the rare skin disease
take the pig as money
                                            hear the monkey with the
nervous breakdown
                                          inter tribal warfare
                                                       inter tribal warfare

are these white lines on the road or painted
up your face?
                             take me to the single mens hut
get me drunk on ferment
                                                    home milk delivery
is that a custom or a superstition?

        flash me a strange bird hit me
with a courting ritual
                                           I want a pot-bellied view
of a quirky mixture of old and new
I mean I'm dancing
                                       look at me
I'm slapping
                          time

I mean
is this a poem
                            or a neck ornament?