<\/p>\n
Carl Sagan says I am a lizard.\u00a0 But what does he know about men? He\u2019s an astronomer not an anthropologist.\u00a0 Carl studies star stuff, what\u2019s going on in the firmament tonight. What does he know about what I do down here in the good old dirt of the Earth?<\/p>\n
I am what I am, a monkey, and just because I have a reptilian inner core in my brain does not make me a lizard, just makes me think like one sometimes.\u00a0 But I am all monkey\u2014warm blooded, fragile, upright, thinking, and polygamous, very polygamous. I would kill all the competition if I had to for the heart of a female, and to keep a harem of more just like her.<\/p>\n
Tonight I am sitting out on the grass of my apartment complex wishing I had a little black book of poems.\u00a0 My wife threw me out, said I wasn\u2019t a poet but some kind of a dog.\u00a0 Might have been: You\u2019re a dog<\/em>, a<\/em> fucking dog!<\/em>, a real hot-dog<\/em>, or nothing but a hound dog<\/em>. Not sure which.<\/p>\n But out on this grass I take another swig of Corona, the only beer that leads me to believe that one day I might actually write a poem. I swig and watch a woman stroll the balcony of her apartment, admiring her posture, the way she stands so straight, erect, with attitude as she walks like the fine specimen of monkey she is.\u00a0 And I sense tonight she has a lot of attitude, she is angry or depressed, otherwise impatient.\u00a0 We, I think, this woman and I, are not patient creatures, but diligent, stubborn, determined, sometimes driven, anything but patient; patience is for lizards, which we are not, even if Carl Sagan thinks we are.<\/p>\n She walks to the edge of the balcony and looks down over the side.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure she can see me, so I yell to her.\u00a0 \u201cJust out here on the grass having a beer,\u201d I yell. \u201cSaturday night, warm, not much to do, care to come down and have one with me?\u201d<\/p>\n She looks towards me in the dark, perhaps seeing nothing, only hearing my voice out in the darkness.\u00a0 \u201cI was considering killing myself,\u201d she says into the dark. \u201cThrowing myself right off of the balcony here. But maybe getting drunk would be a better solution.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re only on the second floor, you wouldn\u2019t die anyway.\u00a0 Probably just end up paralyzed, and then you couldn\u2019t kill yourself if you wanted, unless you could figure out how to unplug the ventilator with your teeth.\u00a0 So, yeah, might just as well come down here and share some beer under the moon with me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo you\u2019re suggesting I come down there and take in some of that moonshine, in the moonshine, with a stranger, with a strange manner, a man I\u2019ve never met, don\u2019t understand, don\u2019t have a clue whether serial killer or not.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI am no killer,\u201d I say, brandishing my beer sloshing warm in its bottle, \u201cbut a serial lover, my dear.\u00a0 A lizard, or so says that science-twerp Sagan who claims I have the brain of one.\u00a0 But he doesn\u2019t know me, and if he did, he\u2019d know I am a polygamous monkey, and neither lizard nor serial killer.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo,\u201d she says, \u201cI can be safe down there, in the dark on the grass with you?\u00a0 I can drink my heartache away under the moon and the worst thing that could happen to me is I end up being polygamous with a monkey, not a lizard, even if Carl Sagan thinks you\u2019re one, which you\u2019re not?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh honey,\u201d I say, \u201cyou are too cool, and you\u2019re funny, and you have beautiful shoulders, and nothing to fear from the monkey king.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo you\u2019re not just a monkey, but a monkey king?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMonkey king of Monkeyville,\u201d I say, \u201cmy splendiferous, polygamous kingdom by the sea, where I take in the lonely damsels and I don\u2019t mess around\u2014for when I take them, I take them, and when I bed them, I own them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell then I\u2019ll be right down,\u201d she answers, and disappears to the back of the balcony where I hear the doorwall slide open and shut with a slam.\u00a0 She is coming, and for a moment I worry about what to do. Maybe Sagan is right, perhaps, and I\u2019m more lizard than king.<\/p>\n But in short time the apartment building door opens and she walks across the grass.\u00a0 She is shorter than she appeared from below, but even more fetching as I trace her pert little nose turned up a bit and the dewdrop look of her deep brown eyes.\u00a0 And I am in love instantly, lizard, monkey, dog\u2014all of me\u2014I am all three in love and very little else in Carl Sagan\u2019s cosmos matters.\u00a0 I get to my feet, yet as I try to speak out comes just a tiny, raspy sound.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m Jack.\u201d<\/p>\n She stops and I can feel her eyes give me the once over, but she doesn\u2019t run, doesn\u2019t do much of anything, just kind of looks at me. \u201cSarah Jane,\u201d she says, \u201cand I haven\u2019t had a really good lay in about six years.\u00a0 How would you like to stretch me out tonight? The doctor says it\u2019s good for me.\u201d<\/p>\n It cannot be happening, it is not happening, it can never be happening, that is, to me.\u00a0 My ears have heard, but my mind does not accept. I\u2019m not sure if I\u2019ve ever had a really good lay, ever, not in thirty-six years.\u00a0 But, as I have learned, everything changes, nothing stays the same, even lizard monkey dogs like me can be loved, or at least, the laws of large numbers being what they are, we can get lucky, at least once anyway\u2014it\u2019s a long life and I\u2019m still young within it.<\/p>\n \u201cWelcome to Monkeyville, as in Monkey-around-ville, my boudoir is right over here,\u201d I say, pointing at the crumpled grass beneath my feet.\u00a0 \u201cI was just sitting out here thinking about which maiden I would have bathed in oil, perfumed, and brought to my tent. And then you arrived on your balcony, I looked up, saw you, was smitten, and now, am totally yours.\u201d<\/p>\n I blab on endlessly, no idea what I\u2019m saying.<\/p>\n \u201cYeah,\u201d she says, \u201cuntil the next time your majesty decides to imbibe on a Friday night and another fair maiden wanders off her balcony and across the grounds to your kingdom, your monkey kingdom.\u00a0 You\u2019re a polygamous, rat-sucking, lizard dog of a monkey king, just like my boyfriend, but I don\u2019t care.\u00a0 I just want something hot and stiff tonight, and I don\u2019t care what all of the above I called you, or what you actually are, as long as you can make me forget everything for about six or seven seconds, which is about as long as paradise, or infinity, or orgasms ever really last.\u201d<\/p>\n It comes from her very lips.\u00a0 And what are the odds, I\u2019m thinking, in a million lifetimes, a million galaxies, of the millions of atoms floating around in the universe of her, of the millions of miles and light years they all had to travel to reach my own drunken atoms on this Friday night, what is the chance of something like this happening to a menagerie like me.\u00a0 And I\u2019ll tell you\u2014none.\u00a0 So when I hold out my hand to her, expecting to whiff harder than I would at a Roger Clemens fastball, I am surprised to feel real flesh, soft, warm, perfumed, female-feeling flesh.\u00a0 And when she drops my hand and puts her delicious arms attached to the magnificent shoulders around my neck and plunks her full, round, lipsticky lips against mine, I just might pass out from the glory, the thrill, the sheer impossibility of it all.<\/p>\n But I don\u2019t.\u00a0 I kiss back, and feel the heat like hydrogen roar out of her, the fusion, ignition, flames.\u00a0 I have never stood in the fire and roasted like this before. I may well be swallowed into the pit of a black hole, sucked into a lightless vacuum where nothing could exist or ever would exist, or ever want to\u2014it\u2019s that good, that glorious.\u00a0 It\u2019s paradise if there ever was one, and at that moment there is, it is Monkeyville, and I, its king.<\/p>\n But why is it when good things are happening there\u2019s always apprehension, some sinking feeling that goes along with good fortune, as if the moment could at any second unhappen, disappear into the empty darkness of the space we occupy? I kiss her anyway, uncaring that at any moment this lapse of reality could burst into fire like an Ohio Blue Tip match and combust.<\/p>\n When our lips finally part she pulls me towards the earth, trying to ground me, plant me right where I stand. \u201cYou have obviously kissed a woman before,\u201d she says, and then, thoughtfully, \u201cthere\u2019s a secret desire that all women want, which is to know that at the moment of a kiss they are alone among the stars with their lover, that no other light exists in his eyes but hers. You give me that feeling and therefore I open myself to you, whatever you wish of me, whatever you desire, you may have.\u201d<\/p>\n I am not a king, a hero, nor anything but an underachieving shoe salesman with a master\u2019s degree in particle physics, which may provide me with an understanding of the properties of the atom but cannot feed me at any level of existence along the Planck scale.<\/p>\n \u201cI think I love you,\u201d I stammer.<\/p>\n \u201cNo you don\u2019t.\u00a0 And I don\u2019t expect or want you to.\u00a0 I want you simply to walk with me back to my apartment and give me the same thing my pig of a boyfriend is getting tonight from someone else.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, to the apartment, and paradise,\u201d I tell her.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know what her boyfriend got tonight, but I swear I got it all.\u00a0 This angel of the round shoulders, pert nose, and lambent brown eyes knew more tricks than any monkey on fifty feet of grapevine. Still, in the morning, when our eyes meet for the first time in sober daylight there is somehow the need to apologize.\u00a0 \u201cSorry, I\u2019m not even a monkey prince let alone a king.\u00a0 I\u2019m the kind of prince who when you kiss with your eyes open turns into a frog.\u00a0 I do everything backwards.\u201d<\/p>\n She gives a bright smile, cheerful, and winks.\u00a0 \u201cBut I love frogs.\u00a0 And now I\u2019m hungry, so how about some breakfast?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s on the menu, bacon and eggs, hash browns?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFrog legs of course, what else,\u201d my princess answers.<\/p>\n I thought she was kidding.\u00a0 But damn if she doesn\u2019t have a package of them, crusty and white and frostbitten from the freezer. And indeed we have frog legs, and champagne, for breakfast.<\/p>\n Time, I\u2019ve been taught, moves only in one direction, forward.\u00a0 So it did, and after some time in which I explain to her the universe, she explains unto me that her husband will be home shortly, he had been out of town but his plane was due in this morning.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought you had a cheating boyfriend?\u201d I say.<\/p>\n \u201cI lied. I have a cheating husband,\u201d she answers.\u00a0 \u201cBut he is my husband; and cheating or not, he is a keeper.\u00a0 So now you must be gone, and gone for good.\u201d<\/p>\n Oh time, I thought, it may only move forward, but memories, yes, those sweet illusions, they can move in all directions, and I go back to them constantly and linger there much longer than I could in any paradise. And if life is but perception, the memories and other lies about what we think we are and were, then I\u2014lizard, dog, frog or monkey king, I ask\u2014is there really any difference?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Tonight I am sitting out on the grass of my apartment complex wishing I had a little black book of poems.\u00a0 My wife threw me out, said I wasn\u2019t a poet but some kind of a dog<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6976,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[92,98,14],"class_list":["post-943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-drinking","tag-one-night-stands","tag-sex","writer-dj-swykert"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=943"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17567,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions\/17567"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}