(a poem in prose)

For it was just the other day when I found myself on a commute home through the forsaken pathways of South Florida, at the witching hour, when misanthropic dithyrambs began pulsating like electricity through my skull. Mendelssohn’s violin concerto in E minor was reaching a climactic crescendo through my car stereo speakers as I whirled passed vagrants, rogues, jinn, and demons at a leisurely forty-five to fifty miles per hour in my metallic blue four-door vehicle. Indeed, scarcely had I made it back into town when I was greeted at a stoplight by what can only be described as a therianthropic chimera of a witch and a satyr. A wicked old woman with crinkled fingers and green medicine eyes, desiring to importune a dollar or, God forbid, I know not what else. 

Arrested by the red light splayed across my windshield, Fate did attempt to taunt me again, in which I thereupon lifted my head and conjured up the dastardliest potion of schadenfreude and guilt as my eyes leered through her teeth. For it could not have been more than three seconds after this ophthalmic spell did this creature begin to gesticulate her boney limbs—frenetic, grotesque, frenzied—in such a way that a spiritual evocation hearkened the most derelict and decrepit animals from the blackness of the abyss up into the ancient streets. An old man as vacant as the night, scurrying stiff, upright, marching across the road with no shoes and no eyes behind the cultural center, a hub, as it were, of historical and artistic expression. A gremlin on wheels, with a chin beard, à la Abraham Lincoln, festooned across his withered face, moonlight reflecting like a kaleidoscope from the top of his scalp: bandaged limbs, festering wounds, and xylazine legs. Seeing that he was preventing my making safe passageway of turning right on red, I halted the automobile behind the cumbersome orange construction cones that ostensibly marched past the horizon, obscuring the ignominy, nay, sheer idiocy of the city, or better yet, of mankind.

Shaken, panicked, and stirred by the whole ordeal, I heaved and huffed as I dove headlong back to my second-floor apartment, not having any recollection of the remainder of the voyage—from whence I came or how I arrived. For knives of paroxysms slashed through my soul as I approached utter histrionics. For it was apparent that God, or Beelzebub (for I know not which), was wringing out my soul, like a filthy sponge, of the alleged humoral imbalance that has plagued my psyche since birth. This disgust, sickness, and spite is a heroic medicine, a concoction that is steeped and brewed daily in my heart. And yet, its herbs are bitter to the taste and the elixir is too harrowing, quite frankly, for the modern man to swallow. For one dip of the tongue and the stench of iniquity—malodorous, sulfurous—is made manifest. The pariahs are raised up to the status of the demigod and the so-called rulers of the world are cast down to Sheol, where there is nothing but anguish and decay. 

Haunted by this reality, I lay in bed all night, eyes bloodshot, transfixed on the popcorn ceiling that continuously taunted me in my sleeping quarters, until crepuscular rays began lurching themselves past the horizon in multifarious color. To be sure, soon the town would wake, more than likely, to the sound of an alarm of from a cellular device, complete with a pop-up notification stating daily usage: eight hours and seven minutes (down fifteen minutes from the previous day!). A small victory? Forsooth, one small step for man, but one giant leap for mankind! I still think about that old lady at the stoplight—I pray that she sees heaven, but I know that she’s in hell.