The Sunday Poem: Jungle Book, part III

I am running out of bits of the Jungle Book poem to post. 🙂 There were only seven segments that I finished, out of many more planned. Ah well, I doubt I will ever resume the project, given that it’s from 14 years ago. I was discouraged from proceeding with them by my thesis advisor, actually, who disliked the style — basically prosy, observational and imagistic.

The way these developed is that they were actually written based on room descriptions I had done for the LegendMUD Seoni Jungle area. When I read them now, they read less like poems about the original Kipling stories, and more descriptions of a place, a setting that is somehow a fantasyland, an ur-version of the Seoni, as if it were a real place that Kipling and I both dreamt of. That’s what gameworlds try to pull off, often, so it’s unsurprising that these read to me like poems about a gameworld with trees larger than possible, civilizations more ancient than history, and so on. And of course, often our gameworlds are greatly incomplete — lacking in solidity. As this poem says, “…everything is shaped… like the spaces between plants.”

III.
The Streambed

Moss on all sides
     Rock iridescent green
  Dark rusty brown
     Water drips with a tap
          Tap tap tap
  The stream is dry
      But water flows across leaves
           Dew trails trail
       Streambed lined with rocks
              Head sized round rocks
          Held in place with plants
               Like green sprays
                  Water crashing against
              A coast a cliff a cranny
           Walking on the skulled
             Rocks the ant path
         Trickles the trail
           Fuzz on plant stalks
                Shifts lights and shadow
           And foliage whispers
         The green takes over
       The world and everything
     Is shaped like leaves
        Like stalks like roots
       Like the spaces
          Between plants
     A wreck of rock tumbled
  Like a heap of pebbles
       Pried greenfingers
    Leave mortar pulled
      From rock and rock
  Nothing is left here
    But the Poison
  People
a whirl
 wind
  of
thorns