One day Monkey was called before the Monkey Council.
\nShe was to prove the the prehensility of her tail,
\nher cleverest organ by far. She smoothed down
\nthe sleek black fur of her body, and then picked
\naway her doubts like fleas from the forest of her scalp—
\nbiting down hard on each one to extinguish its wriggle.<\/p>\n
Wearing a brutally-fanged smile, she swung straight down
\ninto the grove where the Monkey Council sat waiting.
\nMonkey-question after monkey-question they asked,
\nand all the while, the ballet of her tail astonished
\nthose among the Council fortunate enough to have been
\nborn imbued with something one might call a “soul”.
\nShe restarted the heart of Oldest Grandfather Monkey
\nwith a squeeze of her tail, when the shock of her acrobatics
\nsent him over the border to the far side of sleep.
\nFruit rained down where she swatted the trunks of great trees,
\nand she calculated the best way of skinning bananas
\nusing nothing more than a tray of sand and her tail.<\/p>\n
At the end of the exam, decorously squeezing
\nthe proffered tails of the Monkey Council one by one,
\nshe shook them firmly, as a proper civilized Monkey
\ndoes, and swung off, following the river back home
\nbearing confidence enough in her successes, and
\nremembering Tiger’s having felt such envy,
\nwishing aloud to the moon that his own striped tail
\ncould ever be anything like half as clever as hers. <\/p>\n
– Gord Sellar, April 2004<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One day Monkey was called before the Monkey Council. She was to prove the the prehensility of her tail, her cleverest organ by far. She smoothed down the sleek black fur of her body, and then picked away her doubts like fleas from the forest of her scalp— biting down hard on each one to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[12,11],"series":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tigermonkey","tag-love-poems","tag-tiger-monkey-poems"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xIep-C","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions\/63"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}