A Prisoner’s Plea

Lift this. Please. Take away from me this weight heaped upon my chest and let the freedom of a harmless man displace this burdened air. What am I... to them? I am the sacrifice... the tortured soul that breathes despair by their fabricated democratic prosecution and their fraudulent decree--guilt by association, indeed. My pain will not break their windows as they slumber this night. No suffering will rap with bloodied, swollen knuckles at their doors. Yet they are incapable of comprehending the distance to which my screams will travel to meet their sanctimonious hearts. Lift this horrid constraint, for their sake, and I will squash my hatred here and now lest the spectre leave my weakened body, condensed and filled with wicked ways, and snatch up all their children as they skip away and tumble and play and frolic in their fields-- careless, intrepid, foolish. Lift this--I beg of you. Death does not pine for me, nor travel swiftly as heroes predict-- it scoffs at my anguish though I call for it by name. Do you hear me, Icy One?! I am yours! Wield your sharp and rigid shears to sever the sacred Thread of Days, and charge the buzzards once again to task. Enlist their beaks and appetites, engage their terrible practice upon my limp and lifeless flesh! Employ the worms to do their work! Devour every fiber, every cell down to the last. Erase every tiny gene-- the very architects of my construction-- to feed their young what putrid morsels they should find to line these starved and foul, repugnant bowels! Do your eyes deceive you, Death? Do your ears find my words pat and insincere? Do you suspect they want for candor? That tomfoolery you hear? Can I not provoke you, Spirit?! I spit at you! Do you see now, friend? What alternative conclusion can be drawn from this equation but that I simply cannot qualify for death's merciful release? Will he ban me from Hell and Heaven, both, simply to prolong my suffering? Lift this. Free from your sight this pathetic form, this shorn and flightless bird, this hollowed shell, this living hell... let the pulleys turn and the cable flex its twine. Let not this chapter end with routed, dismal, sullen truths--this long, tormented paragraph... loathsome rotten prose.