Junior economics and government and politics major
These are the observations and thoughts of a man at a party, told in a poetic stream of consciousness style. The language is uncouth, the thoughts are jumbled and the content is controversial. And that is the point.
What beasts violate the sanctity of my being? Thoughts stumble over one another like willow trees blown down by torrential downpours and violent hurricane breaths. My peers, like my thoughts, struggle to erect themselves, some falling while laughing with uncontrollable jubilance, some bowing before their God while they speak porcelain prayers. Half-man, half-beast.
I call myself a knight for knowledge. Where the universe ends, so does the quest for inquiry, though I perceive no boundaries to my struggle and triumph to emphatically consume knowledge.
So why do I defile myself in this basement, with walls so grotesque and splattered with an unassuming white, while those very walls chuckle at our hypocrisy?
Watch the man make his far-off lover a cuckold. She, like our fading memories of innocence, is completely out of sight, thus out of mind. While others dance like harpies, hovering overhead, preying on the masses of virgin meat laying terrified in a sea of horror. The ground overruns with grime, sludge blacker than tar, spilling and mixing itself with the forbidden juice. The walls shriek, “You will never leave.”
So their startling prophecy becomes fulfilled. My cup overrunneth with elixir so toxic, so menacing, it is banned to those not of age. My mind dies, leaving me a shell of being, disoriented and intoxicated from my own hypocrisy. I praise myself a scholar, yet anoint my head with disgrace. Lest we may say, you leave half the man you arrived as.
And what man might live in the insincere world he constructs for himself? How can one call himself king when he is merely a Shakespearean fool? One who claims an air of supremacy so stratified and surrounded by the aromas of intelligence and understanding, yet enables the detestable practices of the savage. The mere occupation of this wrongly enamored space validates its evil exercise.
Look at the two men — both belonging to a communal bond reserved for those who rely on the wealth and prosperity of others. They fight like wolves, desperate for food. Watch them trade punches, like comets pelting the young Earth, leaving their surfaces scarred and tattered with devastation.
Look at the broken relationships. These words are meant to be banished to the realms of the mind reserved for the most objectionable ideas. Watch them flow like the river — less a flow, more of a furious cascade compelled by a tempest. The arguing friends lace each other with vulgarities. Brotherhoods, sisterhoods and courtship, like ancient Grecian art, once so magnificent and splendid, degrade and crumble.
While we enjoy this poison, somewhere within the walls of a bedchamber is a crime so explicitly horrid I much wish to never confront its existence. When copulation is defiled by the tryst of a madman who unrighteously robs a woman of her body, and destroys her. Yet this abominable bastard is nothing less than that of a fiend, driven by drunken revelry to commit the unspeakable.
Does my being here enable this? My mind struggles with this sickening notion. While I stumble from the confines of this insane asylum we call a party, I hear the heavenly chorus of Passion Pit. They cry out “Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh! Yeah, they love you when they need you but some day you’re gonna need to find some other kind of place to go, oh.”
The operatic vocal arrangements, at that moment, are no longer affirmations of the spirit of humanity. Those voices become the indicting fury of justice passing an incontrovertible guilty verdict, ruling my hypocrisy and my enabling as beastly.
Marc Priester is a sophomore economics and government and politics major. He can be reached at marcpriester@gmail.com.
