I'm putting it up only because I don't understand why I've let it hover around on two separate computers for all this time, and it's time for me to let it go. Not a poem, not real prose, just…a thing.

KTW


SIGNS AND PORTENTS: Sheng Xiao

Year of the Monkey I, February 23, 1944: A disquisition on male ejaculation

Monkey god born under the sign of General Zaius, or a zookeeper. The
concept is too disgusting to be borne for the length beyond a thought.

When I was a child I thought as a child, and we laughed ourselves to
near-vomiting by going to the Bronx Zoo monkey house to watch the apes
jerking off, prelapsarian innocents among God's so-called higher
primates. "Christ awfriday, hey how much splooge can these guys put
out and with no women around?"  On their fur, on their food, on each
other. Protein is a basic survival tool.

According to Anthony Burgess' version of the execution of Dr. Rodrigo
Lopez, the Queen's previously Jewish physician, the Portingale,
sentenced to drawing and quartering, did not get beyond the drop which
alone killed him, and like Joyce's Croppy Boy, blew his load when his
vertebrae snapped at the drop. The hangman probably was docked 10
pence for his miscalculation. The anomaly of what is moral:
parents who thought nothing of bringing their children to witness a
traitor's prolonged death at Tyburn whilst held in screaming agony
("See what shall sure befall thee if thou eatest not thy spinach?"),
but covered their childrens' eyes when Lopez spurted like a fire hose
and died on the spot. Later, his housemaid would confess without even
the threat to see any instruments but Lopez' that Dr. Rodrigo was a
basic lustbunny and could do her like a studhorse and keep enough left
over to extinguish small kitchen fires. Ah, those oversexed Hebraics
who want to doodle a Christian girl!

What did his prowess get him?

Monkey II: October 22, 1944

Choosing a Wife

You ought never marry your familiar, especially if you like to fake
Chinese astrological signs. We never asked each other "Yo, babe,
what's your sign," but we found out soon enough: Mendoza's guts torn
from him post-mortuis to gratify the pissed-off crowd, the executioner
sliding around in the Portuguese Jew's semen and guts arrayed like an
evacuated bowel. Our marriage: the melding of seed turned to
bitterness and the odor of a butchershop. Like Uncle Ezra said, "Wrong
from the start." He also wrote "Make it new" but was full of shit
because there is nothing new but clean underwear.

Monkey III, Monkeys like practical jokes

I made two normal children in the womb of the woman I used to love. I
should have been Quasimodo. Did anyone, after watching Laughton in The
Hunchback, ever wonder at the star that presided over his making, what
two thrwarted critters could have coupled under the sewer grate to
make this thing of fear and hellish vision?

We never go beyond the Face and the hump. We never hear the gorgeous
music behind Rigoletto's jester's humpback. We want our women to look
like Angelina Jolie or Penelope Cruz. As the Chinese man said when his
wife birthed a white-sembling baby, "Sum Ting Wong."

Monkey IV, Monkeys like being healthy

       Believing that being sick is a waste of a valuable day,
       Monkeys very rarely feel ill. Their constantly active
       lifestyles are likely what helps Monkeys remain in good
       health. When Monkeys do become ill, such feelings are
       generally the result of feeling nervous.

Awaken before visions can dispel. Sick of body or soul.  I am aging and
my joints ache. I am the Mass of complaints that concelebrate with my
demons.

Monkey V, Career Advice

I have had more jobs than times you've gotten laid. Quiz: describe
your last orgasm. I can almost describe my last job.

Monkeys VI, Relationships

I once skimmed a book about the bonobo, remarkably humanoid
chimpanzee, with a photo of two bonobos fucking. The male does not
take the female from behind: they assume the Missionary Position and
their faces are close enough to touch each other. Extrapolating from
the primatologist Frans de Waal, they would be very bad Catholics for
they use sex for affection and peacemaking, to settle a dispute, and
propagation is only a secondary concern. If a child is born of a given
union they may raise it or they may behave like some human parents and
destroy it as countless human parents have done, imitatio Cronus,
setting aside he wasn't really human but was supposed to be a
god. Psychoanalytic tales tell of parents who, like Cronus, devour
their children from fear of the rival they have made, or from their
horrid realization that the child will be human and not a redemptive
god. That story worked in Christian Scripture, but never again. And so
the history of child generation is a history of abject and toxic
failure that leaves bones scattered about like this is a elephant's
graveyard.

Wood Monkey, Years 1944 and 2044

     The Wood Monkey’s exceptional communication skills enable them to
     interact well with others. They’re hard workers who have a keen
     understanding of the way things operate.

Caught in a lie. I don't have a clue how anything operates. If I owned
a power drill I'd be able to set up a crucifixion assembly line but I
cannot operate the goddamn thing without becoming my first victim. I
can't even lace a pair of sneakers for a morning run without catching
my fingers in the ties. I don't want to coummunicate with you unless
I'm being paid for it. Communication is a profession. I want to end
each discussion with "Good night and good luck" as though I were
Edward R. Murrow but I'm grateful I survived 45 years of non-filtered
cigaretttes. Why tempt fate?

2044. Who can think forward to age 100? No fond or mad wishes. I
expect to be gone, asleep with cabbages and kings in a field.