Dear Insane Silverback Gorilla Bling

What is your sad story? Why were you sitting in the window of an otherwise unremarkable jewelry shop in New York's Diamond District, just after Christmas, amidst other comparatively tasteful—if far less garishly ambitious—baubles? Did the primate-loving impresario who commissioned you, perhaps overestimating the sustainability of some heady, early success in the hip-hop and/or high-end poaching games, fall on hard times, leaving you imprisoned with other sparkling victims of a still-foundering economy? Are you roaring with rage at the nearby watches, with their diamond-encrusted faces the size of stop signs, for the utter banality of their excess? Do you long for a crystal-encrusted body, so that instead of living out your days dangling from the neck of a patron with questionable financial priorities, you might rise up on your mighty haunches, smash the glass through which tourists gawk at your beheaded impotence, tear at their fleshy, corn-fed necks with your deadly fangs, then escape onto 47th street, the less-precious jewels dotting your knuckles scarring the pavement as you scamper westward to terrify the wide-eyed throngs on Broadway?

Or are you content with your lot, and that seeming roar is intended as an inviting, if a bit incisor-heavy, smile meant to lure in the potential adoptive family whose eager fingerprints smear the wall of your temporary home? (Can we have him, Daddy? the children plead, tugging at the sleeve of his overcoat, then cry, He'd be such good friends with our sapphire Yorkie and Ruby the parrot!) And would you shed several flakes of glittertears from your brilliant-cut eyes when the father quietly shakes his head and ushers his kids up the street, leaving you once again to share your dreams of a different life only with the lonely rings and forlorn brooches that still surround you?

And, finally, before we move on, remembering with a curiosity-killing chill the suspicious jeweler's gaze that drove us away before we could ask you these things in person, would you answer one last query? What the fuck is that thing in your mouth? We think it might be Texas, but we can't be sure. Alas. Perhaps some questions are best left unanswered.

Mark Lisanti is everywhere, if "everywhere" counts as Twitter and Tumblr.