See also:

Let's be matadors next time. Let's press proud and out with our ashtray hips like castle battlements, let's dress up every day like Chinese fireworks, let's have our thighs and hips unzipped by near misses. We could have dirt in our eyes all the time. The bull would come at us heavy dark and dumb, like cough syrup, exactly precisely just the way we want him to. Just close enough. See by the time he gets to us his head is stuck down low by his feet like he's dropped pocket change, by then his neck muscles are too tired and too wet to be too useful. The picadors take care of that. If he comes at us a wrong way that we don't like all we got to do is snatch at the lollipop banderillos stuck sticky in his neck and untied sides, we'll jerk backwards from our hips and elbows like we're starting a lawnmower, we'll... (no? Matadors can't do that? Well why, who says?... oh then.)

Or monks, too-- we could be monks, if you want. We could pull and preen at blackbird robes, and panhandle on Easter and Christmas and bless babies and shave our heads. We'd sleep but for only five hours a night-- we'd light skinny wax candles between our toes to use as alarm clocks. (we could meditate carefully each and every morning on the glassblower blisters, we'd bust them and scrub them with cedar chips and horsehair to make them worse. we'd show off the damage to the world like dueling scars.) We could move to Munich. Or Tibet, or Damascus, Mississippi for all I care, we would never drink again, we'd sleep with our hands above the covers each and every night for five hours with a candle burning, no spider ever need fear since we'd never smash them we'd always pick them up in paper towels before releasing them tenderly out in the wild, we'd pick them up so soft and easy like they were newborn nitroglycerin, we--

... no? Oh then.

How about marksmen? We could be marksmen. From what I've heard the real secret with rifles is you got to squeeze the trigger, squeeze it, don't pull. I heard that from a marksman I'm pretty sure. Or maybe it was you? Oh then well instead you can choose. Architects? Acrobats? Pharmacists? Palm-readers? Let's you and me be the same things next time.

We'd be less dangerous that way, that way we could see each other an eye for an eye. Remember you the Punjabi peasant raising sesame and guava and spotted goats, remember how things didn't work so well for us then. If I were a peasant too, maybe it would have worked. I would think peasants get on much better with peasants than with cobras.

And even if sometimes it was okay, even with you the cottonswab tabby half-dead with comfortable living and me, I was a bale of sunlight that time, even then it was smooth sailing but what did we get out of it? It was alright but what else? It was us but it was nothing. It was smooth sailing, but too comfortable, and we didn't get a thing and even worse we didn't even know it. (we were better off, I think, with me the actual sailor, and you the beartrap coral.)

Let's you and me be the same things next time, I don't care what, you can choose. Just make us the same. Let's be unzipped at the hips or barefoot or bedridden, or harelips or lepers or roadkill so long as we both got it bad exactly precisely the same way. We'd be safer that way. Then we'd know. And once we know then we can turn different from each other, but better this time, better because we could go simpler, much simpler, so simple-- then let's try you a mouth and me an ear.