Nancy's Poetry Review Forum

“CLEAN IT UP! CLEAN IT UP! CAN’T YOU ALL SEE THIS CITY IS DEAD JUST LIKE THE REST?!?!?”
“THE END IS NEAR! MAN IS SINKING! MAN IS DEGENERATE! MAN IS NOW THE BEAST!”
“FIRE WILL CLEANSE THIS PLACE JUST LIKE IT DID LA! FIRE WILL CLEANSE IT ALL!”
Clean like the first breaths of spring, with the sickly glow of freshly polished linoleum, the well groomed young man stalked the street screaming his apocalyptic warnings with the pain of a motherless child. As far as me and most of the other 3 million people that lived here were concerned, they were just words from a sparklingly fanatical young man with a taste for the overdramatic. I had watched him all week, but he had been at this for months. These streets were his streets, this corner his corner. The change was gradual, suffusing outward from him like ink into an ocean, but the blackness was getting darker: the sick, weary, ugly denizens of the streets, they were slowly becoming his people. Where one man had once paced, three soon followed. Where a few had once prowled, fifteen soon swarmed. Today his church of the streets had reached an all time high; today thirty lions were especially hungry. I was sick from the appetite my eyes couldn’t seem to fill, so today I would play a righteous Daniel in reverse, today I would go into the lion’s den.


“You know, you’ll never change this place.”
It was a whisper, hurried, under the breath of a passerby, but as the man turned around to look at me, I knew this was a whisper that had not gone unheard.
“You’re one of them you know, the clones in suits, the drones in the grey, glass, and girder hive. Well, you’re the reason I’m here. You’re the reason me and three hundred million other people cant sleep at night. You’re the reason I feel sick with the subconscious guilt of the American Dream unachieved. Well damn it, your cult of the goddamn dollar is the sickness. and I am the prophet sent to cleanse this place of every plague and placebo you disease peddlers call ‘hope and progress.’
I looked at him, free of the blame he so desperately wanted to place on other people and saw in his eyes the fear of an animal cornered.
“You really have no idea do you? I’m the disease? I’m the predator? We are all the disease. For so long we have been plagued by war or sickness, but the truth of it all is that we are the plague. It’s sickening, you’re sickening, and I’m sickening. We are all on this sinking ship, but face it…you and I are both still nailing holes into the bottom while we scream that someone else stole the rudder”