The monkey played harmonica
beside the highway diner sign,
small hands gripping metal
like a secret he could almost translate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Truckers stopped laughing first.
Then the children.
Then even the waitress carrying coffee
paused beneath the neon buzz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The notes came bent and weary,
as though the monkey had inherited
some exhausted human sorrow
through a laboratory error in the stars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nobody taught him the blues.
That was the frightening part.
He simply knew them,
the way rain knows rust.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The monkey played harmonicabeside the highway diner sign,small hands gripping metallike a secret he could almost translate. Truckers stopped laughing first.Then the children.Then even the waitress carrying coffeepaused beneath the […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[899],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-rockbob","post-9522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-improvising"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9522\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}