Paean to Bicillin L-A ® and the End of Harry Harlow's Rhesus Monkey Experiments

Abstract

I was in Harry Harlow's “Pit of Despair,” that walled
 isolation chamber with a one-way mirror: spent months there,
 rocking like a horse turned wooden by the blank stare
 of a mute whisperer into part of an attic's
 unaccounted boneyard. I do know how it feels to suckle
 at a wire mother, because a tin mom's teleprompter
 was the script given me by captors
 whose transgenic faces tarred my raptor-feathered fight. 
 Isolation, that velvet rope of triage that cannot be deveined,
 spelled out America's subliminal apartheids
 like a bride's soft skin that lives within her hardened marriage.
 
 I started off homebound, a leitmotif of the Mandela
 Effect, once a latchkey kid, keyed up in the collective amygdala,
 then gently cordoned off the way a capsized crew
 is threaded off from where they tread together
 until one of them goes lost. Later, I was rigid as the monkey
 huddled in a corner, egg-eyed like the tempest
 of an anthropomorphic psychosis that society sections away. 
 That monkey's mutagenic life became the DNA of
 all human cruelty. I pined for touch
 while the chemical cartel nudged me with its ammonia
 waves, and even now, I cry for the word felt.