Linear Vagabonds

The streets are filthy. Garbage is piled on the sidewalks like bodies after a genocide. Flies buzzing through the air like angry taxi drivers caught in traffic. The rotten smell of decomposing leftovers mixed in with paper products and spoiled milk. Jagged lines of used toilet paper alongside the sidewalk for tourist to hop over like some sort of child’s game. Dark figures leaning against buildings with grease dripping down from their hair and dirt digging mines under their fingernails. Malnutrition bodies hover down the sidewalks with flies making camp underneath their eyelids. The bloated bellies are as round as a globe and as firm as an oxygen-filled beach ball. Naked bodies are passed out in alleyways like sardines in a tin can. Their eyes shimmer a pale white and their wounds are the size of valleys. Vultures are screeching through the sky as if they were bats being evicted from their caves. A repetitive phrase is echoed throughout the city like a mantra inside a Buddhist temple. “Deliver me, for I am greatness.”

The masses carry torches in their trembling hands with sweat dripping down onto the concrete. Color-dyed human hair is wrapped around bones that were picked clean by the stereotypical vultures. The hair is dipped in perfume smelling of expensive leather being touched by gold-crested emperors. Matches are stolen from pharmacies and stashed in the pockets of the masses. The hair burns like a fallen city under the influence of arsonists and smells like Death taking a bath with his mistress.

The city is as silent as a pedophile entering a church for the baptism of the mayor’s son. The asphalt trembles like the body of an innocent man standing in front of a firing squad. Thousands of choreographed footsteps pound against the empty street like a meat cleaver. The masses file in using a circular formation like trained penguins at the zoo.