Rev. Reptile

Look at Rev. Reptile poised among the clutter on my desk. See what I have tamed by my finest mental taxidermy. Stuffed, calm and harmless with its dangling warrior headdress, I've exorcised the electric demon. The iguana feared since childhood, the crafty colleague, the open question, the undisclosed contingency, the thing I should have thought of, the violating impediment, the person in my way, the velvet green creature is now frozen impotent, now a mere vile paperweight that I can keep my eye on just in case.

Because I remember how, like a thought in the back of one's mind, they will not move, sometimes for hours at a time, like statues with something secret pulsing cold within. And I think I've heard they can sleep like a scheme with their eyes open, wide and waiting for you to look away until the switch, like it happens in a bad dream, the bulb that zaps before it dies and then their on you in the dark, in a power-line snap to the jugular with stony claws reacting at your neck and a high-voltage tail, the convulsive wire giving up the unsuspected storm that gathered for days upon your desktop, that lies inside all lizard's, laity and clergy.