BACK
Brown eyes stair upon a world of glass and steel;
Small primate hands clutch a mother made of terry cloth and buttons.
Held captive in a place of white walls, cages and test tubes;
She has never seen the land of rain soaked jungles woven with swollen
emerald rivers;
Reflecting cotton ball clouds that sail across a heaven free of blame, hate
or guilt.
Born into slavery from first breath;
Bonding with laboratories crippling odors;
Disinfectant groping with the stench of dry blood and deification;
Smells of misery, suffering and existence without hope.
This opus bequeathed by her prodigal cousin;
Proclaimed in the name of progress, Ordained by science;
Sanctified by the need of understanding.

Small brown eyes that once shined with innocent wonder, shutter back;
Disappearing behind sockets racked with pain from a source it can not
comprehend.
Torture and depression are only dulled by drugs;
Body and mind lay smoldering in a crippled fractured heap;
Infected with our diseases or bruised and broken by the course of an
impact test.
What ever god that guards our little cousin is too far away to help;
Forsaken and forgotten;
Left as a burden to a jail keeper's promise of human and respectful
treatment;
Caught in a daymare, flogged by the chains of selected superiority.

Stores tout our favorite remedy;
Mascara laden shelves are waiting on a whim.
Cures, paint, cloth and weapons of destruction;
Rolling out at the expense of living beings;
Their welfare lying deep within our hands;
We are the keepers or the destroyers of this of planet;
We are the visionaries and the looters;
We are the saviors and the rapists.
With each days passing the forests and jungles grow smaller and smaller;
Yet, the sun still rises on this world;
A world where success is measured by dominance and monetary wealth;
A world where the absence of understanding can be comforted;
By the discharge of a pistol or the crack of a whip.

What future now awaits our cousins and kindred kind?
What future awaits us?
What tribute shall we exact for their sacrifice?
Full consequence will not be tallied at our cousin's passing.
For within their fate our own is bound;
As tight as any fisherman's knot;
Each strand supporting the whole.
As it was at our divergence;
So it may be at the great departure.
Our dependence flows far beyond the laboratory or the zoo.
Our life breath is the balance of this beautiful blue ball;
Suspended from a dream, hidden behind the illusions of Man;
Existing on a swing line taking millennia's to course;
Yet only the whisper of a prayer to start down a path;
A path, that, only once can be only traveled.


Cousin