Everybody's Monkey

[Quixilated]

Hello,

I like how you took the idiom of "the monkey on the back" and expanded the metaphor.  Instead of "getting the monkey off the back" as the saying goes, the narrator suggests we are trapped by them, that we all have problems we can't shake off, that claw at and twist us up inside.  I thought most of the imagery worked very well to further the metaphor.  

I know this is not in critique, but a few lines were confusing to me and I couldn't follow the train of thought that connects them to the rest of the poem.  It may be my own faulty reading, but I'll point them out in case it is helpful to know what landed and what didn't for this reader.  I like the title, but I don't like that it steals the first line of the poem.  I would prefer that the first line be "Everybody's monkey," even if it causes redundancy with the title.  

is on Everybody’s back,
an idiot rain of random claws  
with an inconsequential stare,  Maybe "impassive" instead of "inconsequential?  It's not that the stare doesn't matter, but that nothing matters to the one staring. Yes?
a wind of hunchback fictions  I'm not entirely sure what this line means, other than that the monkey on the back would make one appear to have a hunchback, the wind and the fictions I don't follow.
it twists our skeleton like handlebars,  I love this line.  It's an excellent image of how our problems control us, and how they can seem to reach all the way to our core.
shrieks to its gods I sort of get these next two lines but only vaguely 
when we follow the heart’s track,
knocks our brains against eyes of flint. I like this line.

We pray to a liar’s moon  I like this line.
to pour down its dancing bullets I don't know what is happening here or in the next line.  I cannot understand how it fits into the poem.  
on Everybody's backwards crucifixion  
until Monkey makes another leap.

And so the Circus goes on,  I like this stanza, extending the metaphor.  
on a flat earth beneath a tent of stars
no trapeze, no clowns, no elephants,  a circus without the actual circus, all the other elements are missing except the chaos
just a Ringmaster The monkey on the back, the problem that won't go away, makes the monkey-wearer feel like a hobgoblinesque circus-less Ringmaster: all the drama with nothing to show for it.
with a curious ape-like gait.  Whether he is walking this way because the monkey is weighing him down, or because the monkey is taking over and becoming him, either way I like it.    

Thank you for posting.  I enjoyed this poem.  

--Quix