Evolution Poem by AISWARYA THARA BHAI ANISH

Kumbaya sat like a monument.
As if the Artist had left him to answer nature's call.
His unfinished arm stuck out
like a raw stump of stone, eyes unblinking.
Behind him, his hair flowed like the Nile in the summerparched
and patched, sparse and spare.
Dreadlocks like rotten ropes.
His skin was no longer elastic, it fell from his bones
like melting plastic.
Kumbaya stirred.
A cough escaped his rotten lungs.
He belched.
Kumbaya rose.
Over his head the monsoon clouded up
As if someone had ripped off one of its lungs.
In the distance he saw smoke.
Billowing, billowing boulders
Of thick black smoke.

Then he smelled it.
It tickled his nostrils,
crept into his insides.
It blended into his axions like a shock
and jostled his brain.
Bhang.
A thousand tiny memories flowed to the tip of his tongue.
Women danced around his eyes.
Their naked breasts bobbed up and down
Like coconuts in the Nile.
There are no coconuts in the Nile.
Kumbaya screamed.
He was like a starving man.
Kumbaya breathed in the smoke
with such a hunger, he felt he would die.
Kumbaya closed his eyes.
Memory drifted in and out of him
Like southerlies come to roost.
He remembered.
He remembered the cry of the Oyaru as they set out to hunt.
Their black, black bodies the moonlight illuminating as it
spilled from the sky and spread across their backs.
Incensed by adrenaline.
He remembered the smoke.
The pile of cannabis lit in a pyre.
His mind going in a gyre.

The drink of pig's blood in cattle horn.
The roasting pewter with boiling corn.
He remembered how he'd been caught making love
to another tribeswoman.
Another tribeswoman.
Another tribe.
Tribe. Tribe. Tribe.
How they'd saved him for last and made him watch.
The way the human body could be dismembered.
Start from the feet.
Pry out the toenails.
Suck the hallux and slowly go up.
Lick the skin.
Lick the udders, the neck and chin.
Bite the flesh everywhere.
Children would come and nip
at the soft bits of skin.
They love soft skin.
They love pulpy eyes.
Like they love the eyes of fish.
How the flesh would react to that kind of attention!
First it becomes red like a rose-apple.
Then it bleeds like grape.
Kumbaya remembered. He didn't mean to escape.
He smelled the smoke swirling around him.
He looked at the stump of his arm.

The marks of human anger.
The marks of human hunger.
Of human lust.
Of milk teeth sunk.
Milk teeth. Milk teeth. Milk teeth.
Then he breathed and turned into a monument.
Two hundred thousand years had changed nothing.