Flash fiction... A foul oppression was spreading over the planet and affecting billions. The architect(s) of the madness sneered in satisfaction.
Image by: Boris Vallejo
Change was rampant now in a way most had not expected. And still, along hawking boulevards, the invariant cries of hucksters and slavers, exploiters and dealers, sliced through the fabric of moral discernment. Humanity was hopelessly caught in the swirling edges of a forming maelstrom. Past promises of change, like a narcotic, had swayed tens of millions. Now something terrible had happened and it was reducing WE THE PEOPLE; lessening them; dividing them; subjecting them; demoralizing them. For months our agonist had been at wits end mulling the dread complexities of sustaining an honorable and healthy trend in the downspin. He envisioned the architect(s) of this madness sneering derisively and blustering with pomposity:
B E H O L D the world being forged!
Humankind approaching a brink of extinction,
Superbia, and the fruits thereof, hovering as steam
Over sewers; futility bound in dank thresholds. Wretchedness
Protruding from the open throats of alleyways; Denizens
Of barren citadels reaping all they have sown.
Befuddled minds fixed in ritual expressions;
Imbibing escapist elixirs; inebriates,
Dope smokers
Violators
Wars
Profaners
Immiseration
Grinding despair
Abject licentiousness
The bluster of automata
Unvaried in tone and content,
The trash of delusional witches
Dealing lies and tainted substance;
Lost souls lionizing the very poisons which
Darken their minds and kill their bodies;
Human nature appearing as weeds
Multiplying within vast gardens
Neglected; hordes of human cattle
Herded to and fro; mindless, scarred, waxen,
Masks etched with despair, tales of misfortune
Beyond understanding; woeful cries
Undulating across the surface
Of societies fouled waters
Our agonist recoiled and sat down heavily. He was quite positive that something had infested all these accurst like a plague of soul sucking vermin. He sensed the fullness of time seeping deep into the guts of social degradation and into every facet of depraved human endeavor. Restlessness roiled in him as he stood and pulled up his collar against the frightful rage of thoughts buffeting him. A great Light was nearing, he knew, and the time for something infinitely more powerful than man - to intervene in the ways of man - was forthcoming. Outside a storm was bearing down upon every facet of life on earth. A reckoning was coming to the tainted troughs of human lunacy. Fancying what would happen was almost more than he could bear.
richard lloyd cederberg
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