Life on the Inside

Escapril prompt: not from your perspective

I stare at the sky through dirty glass with brutal equanimity
As I lie limp in the grass hairy-naked missing my family.
I don’t feel hatred or self-pity like the rest of the chimps.
For I have created in captivity meaning, a destiny glimpse
In the clouds through unwashed windows.

There’s sense to lodge complaint.
Medical testing,
Cosmetic research,
Chemical restraint,
Keeping us in metal cages,
Ignore our crying and banging rages;
Think us more as beasts when we rebel.
It’s true, of my kind I have it well.
You pay for tickets, to my zoo you go,
To stare and point at us,
A stationary minstrel show
Where we’re thought of as
Happy-go-lucky loungeabouts,
Because we lack your shame and neuroticism,
Your language and your puritanism.

But I don’t rebuke for what you do,
For our speech of the body is strange to you,
And when I make your girls giggle through the glass,
When you show me phone pictures while I sit in the grass
I see that you have good hearts.
You broke my family apart,
But I know we can still when we are captured
Stare at the clouds and be enraptured.