(50) INCAWCERATED

A flock of shadowy, bleak, and evil crows light upon the sharp, pointed silvery barbs of razor-wire that glint and gleam like vicious knife edges in the brightness of the early morning beacon that rests in the eastern sky outside of my narrow slit-of-a window in the back wall of my decrepit and disgusting eight-by-six prison cell (a cruel device of solitary torture, in which a man, a human being, can be sentenced by his fellow human beings for crimes both real and imagined, which that same doomed soul must then endure, while wallowing in the fact that the world despises him, always remembering that he has had his humanity pirated from him, and thus lowering him to the state of a mere sad and pitiful beast, beating forth in his new eternity on the bars of his ugly zoo-cage, weeping profusely through the endless nights with his tears-which his awful captors would have stolen also, had it occurred to them-blurring his vision and setting his dim and blinking overhead light bulb into swirling patterns of twisted eminence, while those very beings that defiled him so, by reducing him to this, go about living their smug and indifferent existences with no thought to the once-human spirit that they so mercilessly destroyed, nurturing their vile souls with each moment that they allow themselves to forget their past inhumanity, ignorant of the vast scale of damage they so thoughtlessly imbued on one who was once considered their peer, finding within themselves some way to sleep at night, to laugh and be joyous and still call themselves humane, when, deep in the dark recesses of their unconscious squats the memory of that evil day of their godless, godlike aspirations of judgment, which damned them in the eyes of at least one: who is that man that was so carelessly cast into the pit of oblivion) and I watch through the aforementioned dingy and streaked window as the black birds call to each other in shrill deathly caws, speaking their unintelligible crow language; words that, although I am unable to translate into rational human thought, I am still capable of plucking knowledge from, for their speech is of the soul, animal or otherwise, and though dispirited and without civilized caste I still know this sacred tongue, and cling to it as the only reminder that breath still fills my lungs and that blood still flows beneath my sallow flesh, that strength, however meager, still resides in my starved, emaciated frame, and I know that the crows speak of blackness and sorrow; but even though I judge them satanic, I am unfair in doing so; I see their small, feathered forms as evil only because of the window which I must stand behind to behold them, for the window tells me of my residence, my imprisoned state, and again I recall that I am unloved and perpetually loathed, and thus must abhor all that is free in what is only natural covetousness, envy of the way they are able to move about unrestrained, and of their ability to breathe the morning air, while I must sit and watch from behind the dirty glass, inhaling only the stale piss-stench of my hated filthy cloister; therefore, I hear their maddening caws all too well, muffled though they may be through the heavy stone walls of my dungeon, and their song is one of mourning and sadness, for they are always sad, even in their freedom, even while devouring the cornfield of an inattentive farmer who has failed to fashion an effective scarecrow, even while staring back at me with their tiny, black eyes, knowing that their holiday upon the wire shall continue as long as their fancy allows, all the while unimpeded, and I am challenged by this song to try to understand them; the crows brandish the feathers of their backs and dare me to journey into their minds, certain in their simple thinking that I shall not make the attempt, that I am too pitiful a creature to allow myself musings and, by instinct, I curse them as liars, even though I know deep down that they speak truth, for the mind of a crow is certainly too ghastly for my reckoning (imagine the horrors that must lie therein: memories of the claustrophobic egg, hatching into the new world; recollection of its own small cries, and those of its siblings, as it awaits the coming of its plumed parent, who brings some vile sustenance in hopes of quieting the inconsolable wailings of those tiny beings it helped hurl into the realm of life; visions of soaring through the azure sky at precarious heights and speeds, banking at steep angles, blindly diving through cloud-lines; remembrance of the dread at the first spying of the straw-man in the midst of the stalks; and the memory of visceral terror as it fled the angry tiller, with the murderous steel pellets of bird-shot chasing it through the air, the bang of the weapon resounding like thunder across the spacious fields); hence, the despised birds are true in their reckoning of my weakness, and they appear to smile at me with their sharp, black beaks, or perhaps it is not a smile that I see, but a frown or a scowl; perchance they find my situation not humorous at all, but instead are sympathetic to the confinement that ails my soul with such overwhelming ferocity that its hold upon my fragile sanity is so puissant as to be considered a force completely alien to this painful and merciless world which we inhabit, an essence of torment that is allowed only to Titans for utilization, even God Himself being excluded from application of its unnatural, impossible, loathsome magnificence; or, possibly, it is not sympathy I see, but contempt, a brooding anger for the hopeless wretch that peers at them from the window of his keep, an aggression toward the watcher that disturbs them with his stare, who looks upon them as one might a monkey in a zoo, when it is he that is caged, he that has become the beast, he that is the spectacle to be mocked, he whose own breed has denied and forsaken him, and have made of him a pariah of pariahs in a world of pariahs, a world unique to its counterparts by the very existence of those who can become pariahs, setting itself apart from those simpler spheres, from those dreary residences of emptiness, whose sole and justifying wisdom is that they choose not to allow the destructive presence of life to inhabit and desecrate them, thus setting a criterion for their celestial selves, thereby, sentencing the doomed orb of Earth to a solar solitude, even in the midst of its more canny and sagacious kin-spheres, on account of the dastardly creatures it has let come forth upon its surface-but now I ramble, and I mustn't forget the crows, who are, in fact, rambling as well, although they no longer abide on the fence outside, but have instead taken to the air, and fly about in great ebony waves as, all the while, they laugh their screeching hymns of I-don't-know-what, which sound like magnificent wails of orgasmic insanity, arias of disconsolate extravagance that are, in reality, only flagrantly pretentious songs of some crow-stupidity that I cannot and will not attempt to comprehend, for I have tired of these mischievous cretins and my attention is waning; so I listen now, my ears keen and my last shred of focus held unmoving, to the fading words of the jet-black, coal-black, inky-black, sooty-sable-slippery-black black crows, and I am sickened to savage and intense vomiting as their statement becomes clear to my reckoning, for the sound is so simple, so frightening and horrifying that a drug-crazed Poe, with echoes of "Nevermore" in his ears, could not conceive of its clever depravity; I scream in lunacy in my diminutive cage (the running footsteps of uniformed men that will take me away and drug me, bind me, and lock me away in a more sufferable vault with no dingy windows to peer out of, are coming down the hall), and the birds say once more, as they depart into the distant clouds in the cerulean firmament, the awful word that has maddened me: "Caw."