The Complete Monkey Omnibus:
Live at Budokan
(excerpt)

There will be hope for all of us,
delicious soulsoulsoul hope,
when the darkness has descended,
when all the monkeys
have been clubbed
with our Wiffle bats of love.
Only then will our souls
be able to swim upstream
like happy little soul salmons.
Only then will we kick
The Blackness.
Only then will our hearts
grow round and cheesy
like the full moon.


The corpulent monkeys
descend upon us
like unpaid lawyers.
They screech and scream
"Me, me, me!" like
dozens of novice poets.
They scratch at their hair
like little boys
who've been sharing hats.
Only one thing can make them
fatter: similes that go too far, like
a Humvee traveling on a grain of salt.

Prairie Markussen and Daniel M. Shapiro

Prairie Markussen (bodyproject78@hotmail.com) and Daniel M. Shapiro (danshapiro@msn.com) emailed these poems back and forth from opposite sides of a cubicle wall.