The monkey played harmonica
beside the highway diner sign,
small hands gripping metal
like a secret he could almost translate.

Truckers stopped laughing first.
Then the children.
Then even the waitress carrying coffee
paused beneath the neon buzz.

The notes came bent and weary,
as though the monkey had inherited
some exhausted human sorrow
through a laboratory error in the stars.

At dusk he played to the parking lot,
to moths colliding with fluorescent light,
to engines cooling into silence.
The whole world briefly sounded homesick.

Nobody taught him the blues.
That was the frightening part.
He simply knew them,
the way rain knows rust.