Animal Garden (Second draft - September 16,06)

Animal Garden (2) - September 16, 06

I admire the jester-king; Mukwa.
We like to roll in sweet earth and
Smell everything.

You soar with Stoic Miigizi.

You, hardly ever, come down, here...

We doan know goat from shinola.

We both, secretly, long to swim with Atlantic Salmon...
and share in Herculean achievements.

We are meat of Swine.
We are bushmeat.

You spoke to me... of the playfulness of Otter.
I talked you into a case of Beaver Fever.

You lied about the dog...
it was your brother.

You scent-lead me into your Minkish den;
My body... grew dependent on musk.

We are meat of Cervid..
We are bushmeat.

I found a baby Robin in the gutter.
It hated me, for bending down to help it.
It shat in my hand.

Penguin stabbed me, again, in the right kidney.
Goddamn Crack-Penguins.

We are meat of Piscine.
We are bushmeat.

They lead Jolie Birch to Randy Moose and he took her.

They pickled the seed of Archie Belaney...
Some people are planning to torture his clone.
(He suckled vitreous-humour, from Sabé and
ate every legend he could find.

When I do it right...
When I doan fuck it up...

I am starmeat.
I am ghostmeat.

My mum’s very dust is in my bones.


Nanabush is sleeping off a hangover of five hundred years.

Never wakes...
to help out or clown around, any more.

But... occasionally,
he chuckles in his sleep and...
- some military jet falls out of the sky.
- an earthquake sweats a tsunami.
- the sun lights own his fart in a dry forest.
- a scientist reinvents the bionic platypus.

Ideas are born of dust and dreams.
Meat is born of sex, electricity, gravity and death.

The dirt, the Earth; is so patient...
She loves us all; all her children.

But; we are really starting to piss her off.

Nanabush sleeps.

We are dirt, water and time.

We are slime, scale...
fur and feather.

We are angels/worlds/stories-in-waiting.


:Eric C Keast

Tags: poem, poetry, native author, ojibway art, broken vulture art, bingorage, drip and spew