News Item: Chimpanzee Escapes from Zoo in Antwerp

In Antwerp where as everywhere they blink

Skyward through imaginations dark with the speed

Of engineered angels, the people shrink

Before the apparition of chimpanzee

Strutting frankly along the street. In a glee

Of danger they breathe-in the hot hairy stink

Of equatorial terror like freshened air.

Of course they run, for being just as far

Advanced in fright as all of us now are

Only an unsophisticated scare

Like this can hurt them or draw blood from the abstract scar

Winding like a fuse around their marrow.

The chimpanzee, however, at large to stare

For once at worlds that stared at him runs amok.

A caricature of prophetic weathercock,

You might say, he swings his body in sacred rage

Up to the jungle of housetops and begins to tear

Historic tiles and stones apart, age by age.

Therefore to end the story he must be shot

And the whole fairy tale becomes the kind of joke

You wonder if you should tell the children or not.

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