The Fear of Monkeys - The Best E-Zine on the Web for Politically Conscious WritingThe Lar Gibbon - Issue Thirty-Seven
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The Lar Gibbon  from Christiano Artuso The Lar Gibbon is found in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand, although their range historically extended from southwest China to Thailand and Burma south to the whole Malay Peninsula and Sumatra. They are usually found in dipterocarp forest, including primary lowland and submontane rainforest, mixed deciduous bamboo forest, and seasonal evergreen forest. They are mostly frugivorous with fruit constituting fifty percent of their diet, but leaves, insects and flowers form the remainder. Their fur varies from black and dark-brown to light-brown, sandy colors. The hands and feet are white-colored, likewise a ring of white hair surrounds the black face. They are usually active for an average of eight hours per day, leaving their sleeping sites right around sunrise and entering sleeping trees an average of three hours before sunset. They spend their days feeding, resting, traveling, in social activities, vocalizing, and in intergroup encounters. True brachiators, they propel themselves through the forest by swinging under the branches using their arms. With their hooked hands, they can move swiftly with great momentum, swinging from the branches. Although they rarely come to the ground naturally, while there, they walk bipedally with arms raised above their heads for balance. Their social organization is dominated by monogamous family pairs, with one breeding male and one female along with their offspring. Family groups inhabit a firm territory, and each morning, the family gathers on the edge of its territory and begins a "great call", a duet between the breeding pair. Each species has a typified call and each breeding pair has unique variations on that theme. Recent studies indicate that gibbon song have evolved to communicate conflict in terms of predation. In the presence of Asiatic tiger, clouded leopard, crested serpent eagle and reticulated python songs were more likely to contain sharp wow elements than normal duets. Sexually, they are similar to other gibbons. Mating occurs in every month of the year, but most conceptions occur during the dry season in March, with a peak in births during the late rainy season, in October. On average, females reproduce for the first time at about eleven years of age. Gestation is six months long on average, and pregnancies are usually of a single young. Young are nursed for approximately two years, and full maturity comes at about eight years. On average they live to be twenty-five years old. They are threatened in various ways: they are sometimes hunted for their meat, sometimes a parent is killed to capture young animals for pets, but perhaps the most pervasive is the loss of habitat. Their habitats are threatened by forest clearance for the construction of roads, agriculture, ecotourism, domesticated cattle and elephants, forest fires, subsistence logging, illegal logging, new village settlement, and palm oil plantations.

   


Team Player

by

James Hannon

Should I call security? he said to me.
I said, Buddy, I don't have that authority!
Evaluate the situation for yourself--
you don't need to be lookin' first to someone else.

Besides, I'm not wearing any uniform--
I've got my steamin' rage to keep me warm.
So blow that whistle hangin' around your neck
if you'd like a flyin' dropkick in the chest.

Look--the suits upstairs told me to pack my shit
before I ever got to say I fuckin' quit.
I was already sick of puttin' up with all the lies
and the no-raise-this-year-mister alibis.

Disgusted at the bosses chasin' all the skirts
and the girls still forced to play smile and flirt.
So, yeah, my demeanor wasn't all that breezy
when I had to report to those Trumpanzees.

I did my job and credit went to someone else,
his nephew or his girlfriend or the boss himself.
So when I heard I had to learn to manage up
I nearly puked in my coffee cup.

Maybe it's my Irish blood and all those years
my ancestors had to live in so much fear.
Or the rebels sent to an early grave
because they couldn't be polite and just behave.

I can't accept that just because your dad was rich
to make a livin' I'm supposed to be your bitch.
I'd rather sell fruit and pencils on the street
than do what it takes to make executive suite.

So nah, mister, you don't have to call a cop
I'm coolin' down and figure I'm about to stop.
You're just doing your job like I did mine
And I'm not gonna force you into overtime.

They probably wouldn't pay you for it anyway--
and that leaves me just one more thing to say:
the bosses will always cut us down to size
until we finally get the need to organize.

Professional status is a way to say
we shouldn't worry so much about our pay.
It's apparently a privilege to wear a tie
like it elevates us over a blue-collar guy.

But that's just another way to help us split--
a unionized workforce would make them shit.
If and when we all unite and take a stand
we'll finally have the power we need in our hands.


James Hannon is a psychotherapist (concordpsychotherapy.com) and political activist in Massachusetts. His poems have appeared in Blue Lake Review, Blue River, Cold Mountain Review, The Fear of Monkeys, Soundings East and other journals and in Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets (Sundress, 2013). His collection, The Year I Learned the Backstroke, was published by Aldrich Press.
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