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A Contemptuous Devil
by Cesca Janece Waterfield What would an angel say? The devil wants to know. I speak to you from the last place you'd think to look, if indeed you were thinking at all. Going about, as you do, feeling this, desiring that, despising one truth, fearing others. Rarely connecting naturally-strewn dots, the whole enterprise appearing to you as a wholesome table peppered with spicy bits of yourself. Stumbling obtuse to the buzzing network between them: glittering roads relating disparity; paths open to bi-directional travel but paradoxically, those that when misinterpreted, blithely allow enemies to brag and bray from your point of no return. O, you. Groping for a cogent, cold mind. Blinking eyes that cannot come clear, or spy what's clean. What do you know. Binary. Either/or. Lines and circles and nothing more. Your world. Your words. Honey moves slow? Not in Yucatan. Not in Puebla, señor. Not in. Isaac Newton was just a lonely boy from Lincolnshire until the apple and formerly-maintained virtues fell. Plunged to earth, ruby red and gold, too, from heavens where someone else saw cherubs, and wrote a myth. From skin and tooth, rising from silica and humus; out of the open mouths of mischievous sprites came parables, and points of light. Tonight, I plan my return, having bought my ticket, since you, mon cherie, paid my fare. Will pay, again. I need to be redeemed? I see: The chased, the marauder. Winners, hostages. Full is not heavy as empty, not nearly. I lay the law and you let go as my knuckles whiten with the blood letting, and I remain diseased. Mine is an ailment diagnosed by the contaminated alone. Prognosis is mine own. What do you do with who wants to suffer for sin? With who looks upon chains and envisions emancipation? Who drapes their iron weight about and is delivered? Privilege demands remuneration. It is a tacit contract, to which you need not agree. Contract does not line neatly to your conceit, though writ just might. Surely, convention does. Accord is not required of who glances at your periodic table – Fe – and smells minerals. Nor of whom relishes the confinement of physics because she need not lift the latch to visit what it cannot cordon. What do you do with the bee who visits the stamen, the carpel, rich with pollen? Wasps, too. What do you do. Questions, I beg of you. What do you?
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