The bitter orange rust of an age old cage marked my hands and brow as I mewled and pulled against the warm sweaty steel. So long ago yet I remember the bars; so dry the bars, so crusty and worn; I was contained. Contained by this cage, my oppressors looking on, a small mass of them, twenty odd I counted, staring in what I can only decipher as being maniacal glee.

It is hard to tell when looking at beasts.

I pull and howl in these reflections of the past. Not one of the creatures listening. My muscles hang putty and my voice is haggard, ragged and hoarse, chipped china in the wind; what was once delicate and beautiful is no longer as such. It has been damaged. It is an ancient relic. A vase found in a muddy ruin with subtle etching, a true work of beauty, but damned if anyone can see it.

My captors are not so unlike me. Simian, mouths agape, dark hair which lightly spreads over the body like curled, microscopic fingers. The hair grows full cap of the head, how like a human, how like a prototype which should have been destroyed when the finished product was presented. A hang on of a period long gone. Dark, shaggy, uniform at the sides, every one the same look. They dress in modest rags which are neither ahead nor behind the times but just there. The dress is similar between creatures and oh so very androgynous; a naked, untrained eye might mistake each and every one of them to look the same, but upon close inspection each is an individual. Many of the creatures fear too much. No one can get close enough to catechize.

I pull and agitate the bars, yelping and swearing. The creatures look on with curious masks. They – all of them of course - give me a look, one of anger, consternation and inquisitiveness all the while displaying mixed degrees of effacement, not one wanting to be confrontational. This act of considering amongst the lot clouds my judgement as to who is leading the mob. As soon as one mumbles something in their inane language, the sound of it a rising and falling tone of fingernails on a diatonic scale, I get the vague hope I have pinpointed the ringmaster of this circus and that I may – if only I could return to Babel and find the language - explain my case. That creature, the speaker, must be one with brains, able to lead with reason. Alas, as that creature lets fly its heavy tones of scratchy bass the others burst forth with acerbic tones, leaving a bitter taste in my stomach. No one speaks to a leader that way; no one can speak to a leader at all.

And, so, days go by, and months and maybe even years. In containment one looses track of time. How am I to know if my concept of time is correct? These animals, these creatures, these abominations, have held me for what I feel to have been an eternity and yet, to them, maybe, for I know not their mentality, it may have been to them nothing more than a trifle, a lazy afternoon with a little entertainment.

Yet my beard has grown. This tells me some time has indeed past. I have grown old, still protesting, still yelling for my release. I can’t remember any longer why I am kept here. I might have committed a crime. Perhaps, though I doubt it, I caused one of these creatures a grievous harm? I doubt this conjecture for I know the truth. Somewhere deep in my brittle bones, or crawling on the surface of my malnourished muscles, the sinews screaming and quivering like a wounded beast, I know my innocence. I have done nothing more than lived presently with style and grace, and I am being punished for it. Yet I feel ready to cave.

They try to feed me what they believe to be nourishment. They push raw, bloody and rancid meat through the Venetian like bars for me to suckle and tear. So thin these bars! Oh so very strong. I refuse to indulge in their dish. I eat grass that grows tall and unmanaged around the cage. Mosquitoes breed in the damp centre of the wild brush and because of the bites I incur I fear - due to the intense myalgia I suffer and the jaundice like yellowing of my skin - that I’ve caught a touch of malaria. I know I shall soon die if I do not find reason behind my being held in this cruel pinfold.

I begin to grow weak and yet no comfort comes. The beasts dance and sing and drink cruel liquids which look delicious and lovely in their cool spillage in the dusty top soil of this jungle plane. I have not yet explained the leaves of this jungle; on particularly cool days the heavens open and drop of manna pool along the paths and trees in perfect drops. I, in my great wisdom, use the wide green leaves to catch small lakes of the rain in the deep centre but now –oh cruel fate! - It does not rain. Nothing holy from the sky protects me from these beasts of the land, their selfishness of nature, their incapability to see my ill-fated condition, which only becomes such under their so called protection. Oh God! Oh Gods! Release me from this cage!

And my prayers were answered - not as I had hoped of course - but answered. During one of their many celebrations I collapsed, my infirmity getting the best of my frangible state. My body unconscious, I was taken from the cage and placed in the dirt of a small hut. Oh beatitude, oh ecstasy, I had inherited my freedom. Steadfast and true I escaped my cell. Oh glory be..!

When I awoke, my initial delectation was inconceivable, a natural high which I rode as I strolled along the paths of the creatures, smelling their flowers, existing in their harmony. In their guilt, they released me into their world to sup upon their abundance as well and I was rectified in it. I felt dirt in my toes and breathed the oxygen in the air and my integration into the world of the creatures was a symbiotic osmosis which breathed and moulded possibilities of a new world, one where creature and human could live together without the burden of bars and rusty steel.

I even found love with one of the more human creatures. She was graceful yet clumsy, could stand upright but not without tripping and I taught her how to dance the dance of life and taught her to sing the chorus of possibilities. She taught me the tongue of the creatures and we used that argot to wed each other and create new life in the grass by the cage.

As years pass, years I mean only if my perception of time is correct - for my back curves and my sight goes – I have begun to resemble more and more the creatures I once abhorred. Out of my cage I was able to find freedom, to choose my fate and chose a mate and a tongue not of my own. Yet all of it is not mine.

I eat the rancid meat of the community, the meat I once refused. I drink the wine I hoped so often to covet when peering through the Venetian bars but which I now find to be bitter and to cause not joy but diarrhea. I bed with a creature whose body and mind, several years ago, I only bedded in my worst of night terrors…

And as my mind goes – for now I am old, time is no longer a relative figure – I find myself wandering to the cage in the dark, if only to touch its bars and to sit inside; only for a moment of course. In reality there is no turning back. My mind told me when I was younger that being in a cage, living in a pinfold, existing behind bars was about as bad a fate a man was able to receive. I was young.

I dream now in the dark velvet coffin of night of the warm touch of steel bars in my soft, privileged hands.