John Joseph

When your visage graces my screen I recoil and turn away. The jolt fires up my spine and I hover paralytic with my head down and my eyes sidled. A jittery kid hiding and peeking behind the doorpost. Irrational, stupid fear. Fear that has stained my life, stunted my growth. To look away is just to let your mind wander, to freeze that frame and elaborate grotesque imagery from its imprint more haunting than anything solid. Look again. Just a man. Man of affliction. Great, aberrant, horrible. Beyond different. I know your title and the name shadowed by it. Been taken by your history, heard but never seen. Often you've returned to my thoughts, inexplicable as your continued infamy. Your bulbous forehead and crimped mouth and gnarled contusions the marks of defective notoriety. A tumorous enigma more famous than most. Could I see myself in you? No. I wouldn't dare. How ludicrous are my complaints compared to yours, king pariah. There is none more ostracized, no one farther away. But what modicum of backwards luxury there must be in being so outside. In standing behind the cage while people pay to openly mock you. Their hearts revealed to you unfettered from their deluded ideals of good will and empathy. We demand hideousness to be displayed for us to ogle and marvel so that we may ignore our own. But still I don't look. Still too scared. Sulking stubborn in that place where fascination and phobia are one and the same. I don't want to see you. Be repulsed by you, saddened by you. But then, I am already. I walk with my hand over my face. I peek again and you're gone. The face I can never forget. I try to move on with the sackcloth over it now. But I can't. The lesson lingers, the thing you told me. Everyone's ugly.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Isolationist

Among the stalks and fronds there is the face of a man. His visage haggard and gaunt, he rises and parts the bushes. He has on him a dirty army green parka and leather leggings zipped over his pants and under his hiking boots. A large, stuffed rucksack is on his back and a bolt-action rifle is slung over one of his shoulders. He walks the terrain, thick and untouched by the brands of civilization. He is far away from it, as far as he can take himself. No home; no trappings of the multitude to surround him. He is alone in the wild except for a burly, long-haired dog and his thoughts. Thoughts detached and reminiscent, swaying from destitute to tranquil. It is autumn now and the nights are growing colder. He searches for a suitable alcove to set up camp, combing the land with his sunken eyes. A cave perhaps or the base of a protective tree; he doesn't know. The land is a mystery to him. Even now he is still lost. He settles for a bald and flat clearing, surrounded by bushes high en...
Read more

Beasts

A dozen or so tents were sprawled down in a valley. A single cook fire lay among them with men assorted around it eating bowl-fulls of stew and giving some to their horses. There was a horse for every man and they looked underfed and drawn under saddles adorned with diverse cutlery. The bronze tassels in their manes were frayed and loosened, jutting from them uneven quills of hair. And all of them, man and animal, wore some manner of red cloth on them, be it a scarf around their neck or a sash tied around their waist or foreleg. There were no women or children. "Can they hear us?" The boy asked. "Not if we're quiet." Cale said. They spied on their stomachs on a high hillside overlooking the camp. Far enough for them to feel a modicum of calm even in appropriate wariness and suspicion. "Who are they?" "I'm not too sure. Nomads probably."  "Maybe they could help us." "No. Not them." "How can you...
Read more

Geneva

You were thirty-five when you died, thirty-five when my mother was born. 1955, sixty-one years ago. Another age when a woman taken by a man twenty years her senior was not so unusual. A man of the drink and the carcinogenic speech. The baby he didn't want. Called a miraculous birth, the healthy girl from the dying mother. Four months later and you were gone. It was diagnosed as tuberculosis, an antiquated mislabel for hidden and insidious aberrations carried on like a curse in the blood, the genes. The kind that betrays your own body with attacks on the lungs and the liver. Weapons striking sudden and swift. A few months and the trigger is pulled. Such fragile forms set with unjustified disease to make you sure of His sadism as you are of life itself. Pulmatory fibrosis and emergency transplants and cancer. My uncle, your nephew, sits withered and pale. He sucks on an oxygen tank as we watch, sullen. "Wanna hit?" he says. I smile with him. You lived in secondhand storie...
Read more