As Donna Haraway Points Out

The first hominid in space was not
Yuri Gagarin but Ham who
bested Yuri by ten weeks.

Space animals were used by
both the Soviet Union and the United States.
We know the names of the instruments
that made it back like Ham the Astrochimp
(formerly known as Number 65) and
and very occasionally those who didn’t
like Laika the Dog but we don’t know the names
names of countless anonymous others killed
killed in the space race, likely terrified until
until the flaming or suffocating end, victims to
to non-consensual and
and rationalised behavioural conditioning.

A terrified kid of four years old
old when he went into space and
and under normal conditions still would
would have been dependent on a mother.
Lauded on touchdown,
full grown he would have the cognitive abilities of a clever
clever sapiens eight-year-old with the associated
associated human emotional complexities.
Thanks for your sacrifice, Ham, and
that of the mangy dogs, the remorseless sting
of short-life insects and their offspring, the smooth
frogs, gnawing cats, screaming monkeys pushing sweaty ejects,
dull tortoises patently ignitable, clawing neurotic mice,
sweet rabbits and brooding rats shuffling the
brigs, ascending excitable and trusting guinea-pig
flunkies, uncomprehending unpatriotic spiders, bitter
glitter fish and ancestral newts, deep snails popped
non-consensual into the astral firmament,
unbeached jellyfish, sea-monkey brine shrimp,
the underbelly of giggling worms and flopping geckoes,
as new research always stands cruel
as Isaac Newton fails to point out,
on the shoulders of giants. Megafauna, indeed.

The Icarus Primate, Safely on the Ground Again

We have arrived at the black nursery at the end of evolution,
and rumours spread by los cucarachas (who have wrested control)
intimate that every abandoned species has been given
one final lamp and then been instructed to wait.
I told you so.

The natural history museum has been closed.
And I’ll tell you who has been given responsibility for the night shift.
Yep. It’s him, at centre-right,
the solemn ape-person standing upright in the dark.
His face is calm, grey-blue, sick-of-priestly;
His long body’s kangaroo pocket
sure-aspires to carry a small yellow animal at his belly,
a little solar passenger, is this the sun, is this the sun
(he is part primate but also part reluctant astronaut, not yet, not yet)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch,
the red stop sign at the end of Holloway Road
has bloomed to giganto black daisy
whose marzipan petals are not edible and
definitely please do not garnish any wedding cakes with such petals.

Above, said star indeed is made from ice, coral,
blue flame and then, cutting our faces,
from the broken stained glass, prisms,
and inside this sol are masks and tusks,
little mechanical bones, poison, spitting rusks,
and inside his skull
he carries our whole ancestry inside his migraine skull
and inside his skull
not an obligate bipedalist like us
he still refuses to sit down.

You can reduce it all, yes, to small creatures,
lesser beings flickering in and out:
there is, for example,
a pale pondscum face held in the hand-shaped darkness
there are fish-mouths and teeth
there are wings and partial bodies
The black certainly therefore is not empty;
it is plum-full of withheld animalia.
Everything is waiting for a bus.
The ape-saint, he does not move.
The glass-faced sun, it watches down.
Are we worried yet that the Earth may already have ended?

Now we zoom, altitude for acquittal, and below him,
the clouds carry his enormous ape-shadow,
all that metazoa and all those bad intentions,
and still that black circuitry of a flower
no bee with sense should ever trust,
he climbs.

The sun once was brass blowtorch
and now has ballooned to oligarch;
its conference badge reads:
TECHNOLOGY, ART AND THE POSTHUMAN.

The wax gives way, then the feathers,
loose paperwork
in the giddy stratospheres.
his riot-grrl mouth becomes
a red emergency exit or let’s say that red stop sign,
the one you replaced with
where-have-all-the-flowers-gone,
his skull brim-fills with blue glass animals,
his very favourites,
he falls through every category,

the wings
salted silk
God, I am not a violent person,
but slap him once for emphasis.

the ordinary mammals
the wing holes at shoulder base now healing wounds
because he once dared to fly
He has brought the sun back inside him.
So at dawn he rises too,
and at dusk he falls
Every scar says
up.