A far cry from instinct

We are accelerated primates, bones splint by our own speed, our reflexes artillery, even in peace.

We have elevated evolution, traded races, mapped mountains called for plastics, carpets, bricks, embarrassed by the camp fire. But folded in the nucleus fifty thousand years of instinct, we shoulder them in sleep, ancestors shouting instructions from cave pits.

The wild things want your epiglottis, eyelids, perineum, cornered on the cliff, heel at the edge of the abyss, watching the grasses split for plain winds, insects, the whiskers of planets, the knowledge you should never tangle with a sabre tooth kicks in, your gut reflex, messenger to cortex, this is the death bit.

That antique bunsen says give me your wrist, hold it here, steady learn this, remember the skin blistering, and we do not hold the stick by the burning end in darkness, do not put the king in front line of battle, do not prescribe un-tested medicines to pregnant women.

And we learned these, but the borderland between intelligence and instinct is split, leaking brain fluid into skull cavities, and where there were tigers, now there are spreadsheets.

But in the inbox, the email marked as read, saying your horse should be murdered flips the same switch, triggers the reflex, sweat in a chain linking back to the wild things and the cliff.

Our ancestors are heavy handed siblings, we pretend we aren’t related, but they turn up to the party uninvited saying remember we used to shit ourselves at tigers, pushing the same panic when documents vanish.

The moment of cliff-fall, air grab, stomach-drop, shared by us all in nerve roots, applied now to systems and microchips. These impulses, our ancestry, kept in compartments, for the comfort of competence.

This paradox, of never more solo, you on a cliff top of error and office, still as a reflex, a shout from the cave pit you and your ancestors, pulling at chain links.