The forest path is empty; and the tourist hubbub mute. Lay’s, biscuits, banana chips, peanuts… These monkeys lose the alms from visitors. Yet they enjoy the lockdown on the romantic boughs without sanitizers and masks. They foresee rain before it kisses sand. Their infants are beatific within cuddle and care. They don’t perforate the roof of the earth. Genocide and lynching are unknown to them. Never destructive, ever-serene, they live and leave. I must mistrust the monkey lineage of man. First published in The Literary Hatchet.