(pic via)

"...an orangutan named Chantek...anthropologist Lyn Miles () raised him as a signing infant from the age of nine months, rearing him as much as possible like a human child. Lyn toilet-trained Chantek and gave him chores, like cleaning his room, and an allowance. (His favorite thing to spend it on is fast food from McDonald's. ...If he's granted legal rights, as Lyn would like him to be, he could join the fast-food class-action lawsuit and become not just the most verbal but the richest orang in the world....)" --Antonetta (also here)


the venom passing
out of the sunset
like an overlong Hall & Oates cover
by someone you can't quite identify

Ah, Love, let us be true
as darkness takes the street
and traffic does not yet abate
but we start to breathe easier anyway

it could be these city walls will hold
till siege & grief are alike lifted
we both know better

trying not to act like it
because that's what you do isn't it
when you don't know the way & you can't stop


"Chantek calls himself an 'Orangutan Person'. Untaught orangutans, like his cagemate Sibu, he's given the rather snide name of 'orange dog'." --ibid


More Primate Poetics. (Including Gilgamesh in lexigrams.)


"One of his literary friends said that The Emperor is the most important Polish novel of the 20th century!" (via)


"Chantek was the first orangutan to do a live Web chat."