CHRISTOPHER FORD AND THE WALK OF EVERY MAN
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You Will Know What Jungle Means

You will know what jungle means 
  Peering cautious around shadows and under every curiosity for any mystery held tight-lipped like a monstrous cackle
  A shaman behind each door and climbing out of every tree-bark head
  Wild feathers gathered around trunk-necks

You will know what jungle can change in hairpin instants
  Teeth in your shoes; teeth inside your shirt-seams, sucking horribly as they gnaw
  Baby-mouths quenching terrible appetites and injecting unknown sera
  Gulping down their kings-feasts in unashamed slurps

You will feel what jungle feels
  Its arms clutching tightly at the villages it loves, then - too tight
  Tearing holes - its grip leaving blood-trails and sticky markers of its passion
  Furious!  Like a lover left in darkness

You will hear when jungle stirs
  Raising itself on tiny stick-legs that click and stretch impossibly thin
  Chattering in Babel tongues and waving slathered mandibles
    You will turn suddenly at the sound - 
      Half-waking
      Half-staring
    Wide-eyed as its dizzying limbs tear into your belt
    Scattering you prone onto your mattress, panting with distrust and scrambling at sheets

You will curl into jungle's bed
  Grateful for its gentle snoring
  Rivers tucking you softly in and folding down careful corners
  Orchestras of insects in adagio
  Sweet fruits dripping midnight sugars into your open lips

​You will submit to jungle's power
  It will seize you in muscles of durian-stench
  It will throw you to the floor to writhe in dirt and sunburnt scratching
    You will cough, wracked by spider-bite fevers and paranoid terror of
      the canopy
      the underbelly
      the sheer, unapologetic mass of life

You will learn jungle's guilty secret
  Its delicately tended gardens laid in tidy rows
  Flowers floating like soap bubbles in the sun-kissed breeze
  Colors splashing like children in the wading pool
  Nectar streaming out of waterfalls in steaming ringlets

You will study jungle's wisdom
  Taking careful measure of ants weaving in-step
  Lecturing with all the sharpness of milligram brains
  Beards and spectacles dripping from the foliage like mango fruits
  As impatient professors work their way diligently through your bowels

        You will know what jungle means
      It will not compromise to your comfort
            You will know when jungle arrives
                  It will provide no schedules
                You will know how jungle moves
      It will cull your stumble with vicious pleasure

    You will know the jungle
    You will be the jungle
    You will know what jungle means

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I had the good fortune of taking a ten-day trip to Java as a solo traveler in between gigs in Korea.  The island is swarming with people - one of Earth's densest points of human population - and yet on the third day of my trip I found myself in a kampung (village) outside of Bogor, a commuter suburb of the sprawling Big Durian, Jakarta.  My balcony overlooked a raging river framed by trees disappearing into a towering mountain and the hum of the water was all-consuming.  The constant white noise gave my inner Eliot time to flourish and I wrote this poem overlooking the rapids. 

That very morning I'd gone for a swim alone in the complex's pool to be confronted by the largest spider I'd ever seen or would care to see again.  Significantly larger than my hand, it slept quietly on a web halfway between floor and ceiling of the mushalla, the room used (in this case, theoretically) by Muslim staff and guests for daily prayers.  I splashed half-heartedly through the pool thinking of little else but that enormous, dangling beast. 

Shortly after beginning my swim alone in the pool, I was joined by the only other residents of the aging tourist complex that I would see over the course of my stay: five giggling transgendered Filipino women who immediately began whooping and cavorting through the waves, throwing large handfuls of poolwater at each other.  I was struck by the juxtaposition of the moment, at once both amused by the carefree abandon of my fellow guests and also keenly aware of the terrible mindless predator lurking nearby and sure to wake.

I returned to my room dripping over the cobbled pathways and nearly tripped over a croaking bullfrog that had taken a rest by the door of my room.  I had never been in a place so erupting with life, and I felt in that moment I had learned the meaning of the word 'jungle.'
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Next: I Will Be Your St. George, I Will Be Your Dragon   >>>
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  • News + Info
    • News
    • CFord
    • Contact
  • Music + Video
    • Music
    • Video
    • Stop Ford
  • Art + Words
    • Photography >
      • North America
      • Korea
      • Asia
      • Europe
    • Sketches
    • Poems >
      • You Will Know What Jungle Means
      • I Will Be Your St. George, I Will Be Your Dragon
      • Triptych - Gold/Disappear/Served
      • A Voyage, By Plane, to the Desert
      • Warrior in Chains
    • Stories >
      • From A Long Way Off
      • Landing
      • Twins
  • Shoppe