sailing squawking through the night,
the awkward bleaky thwartsome night,
little yardbird you're so cute!
Wipe your nose and
show me your papers,
you are not authorized to fly.
You will never fly.
Deep in the borderless land of Sin
there existed a man who conceived of Virtue,
as he scrabbled away at a nothing job
with a miserable look
grafted upon his face.
It was an accident and he had been day-dreaming,
when virtue occurred to him.
It had entered his thoughts
like the biggest-boned
and least popular
girl at the prom,
with
tiny
tentative
steps,
as he bent halfproductively to the controls
of his station, in the lower ward of Station 7-D,
of the Northeastern Gummyworks sector.
But at once he was apprehended and understood
to be a defective and
very bad egg.
Authorities then threw him into a kind of pit
carved from stinky-reeking red clay,
glistening with a
greenish slime.
in the pit there was a sign.
it said "We your masters will soon fill this pit with stinging
911-legged millipedes and
unpredictable plague-carrying vermin,
and a dozen or so pit vipers.
Imagine the terror it will inspire
and the pain!
Will you repent?"
"what have i done?" begged the man
of his captors, who cast long stringy shadows
and smelled like suppurating wounds
but could not be
seen or heard.
Another sign appeared suddenly,
in place of the first,
and it was clearly nonsense,
but printed in red.
It said "Gabbledy-shivvles,
gabbledy-shivvles!
All around and in the bronkumbe shaye.."
The man who lately conceived of virtue and was now beginning to regret it
read the gibberish helplessly, and
heard a tiny scratching in the clay walls
of the pit.
He felt fear and asked in a tone of
maturing hysteria, "what have i done? what do you want me to do?"
No sooner than he asked these things the sign was again replaced,
and it showed a simple illustration
of a man kneeling with head bowed,
as if to present himself for punishment
at the hands of a Bishop or
some lesser cleric.
So the man did
what most of Man would do,
he blubbered without restraint
and knelt, and then
all at once
the giant bipedal Rats burst from the clay walls,
and performed a fiendish and horrible dance
around the now cringing, weeping man.
It was a menacing and suggestive
tango,
and it lasted exactly thirteen minutes and thirty-three seconds.
When it was finished,
his hair was bone white, and
he was returned to his other rightful, natural position,
at his little station,
but with
his pay reduced drastically,
and serious back pain,
and told never again to daydream
at the controls of the controlled,
the controls of his controllers, that is,
unless his dreams were vicious
wish-fulfillments involving
other people's misfortune.
No comments:
Post a Comment