The Fear of Monkeys - The Best E-Zine on the Web for Politically Conscious WritingThe Dusky Leaf-Monkey - Issue Four
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The Dusky Leaf-monkey, photo from Christian Artuso

Dusky Leaf Monkey
The average body mass for an adult male dusky leaf-monkey is around 8.30 kilograms, and for the female it is around 6.5 kilograms. The dusky leaf-monkey lives in the countries of Burma, Malaysia and Thailand. They prefers to live in closed primary forests, but are also found in old-growth secondary forests, plantation forests, and urban forests. They spend most of their time in the upper canopy levels of the forest, where they consume leaves, although they will also consume fruit and flowers. Social play in the dusky leaf-monkey includes wrestling, sham-biting, jumping on or over, chasing, fleeing, and tail pulling.

 
   

 

The Show

By

John Grey

 

Thank you, war, for coming to my living room.

Without your deal with television, I'd be

watching sitcoms, cop shows. The guy in the gray

suit is telling me five soldiers died today.

And then there's pictures. Does it get any better.

Such sacrifice, they even shrunk the time

allotted to weather and sports to sneak in

one more bomb, another explosion, another

burning building. But war's a kind of weather

in its way. A sport too, from the stats I'm seeing.

Without you war, I'd be mired in the fake stuff:

the blood that's really syrup, the rifles that fire blanks.

People die and yet they're guest stars on another channel.

What's that telling me? That everything is art, is artifice?

The guy in the serious suit knows better.

Some politician says, "We need to quit." But then what?

Arab killing Arab. That'll never play in Peoria or anywhere.

So thank you war, and thank you America. Without our

boys, there's no show. Snapshots of the dead overwhelm the screen.

Five of them. In my home. Not in theirs.

John Grey is an Australian born poet, and US resident since the late seventies who works as financial systems analyst. He has been recently published in Connecticut Review, Kestrel and Writer’s Bloc with work upcoming in Pennsylvania English, Alimentum and the Great American Poetry Show.

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