Post by shiggles on Jul 11, 2011 18:22:00 GMT -5
“Are these little chains too tight?
Your prison is for my delight.”
Shiggles drank the tears of children. As a clown, he understand that, in a child, joy and terror were emotions that stood close together. He's used this knowledge to make children cry. Then he swallowed their tears.
This nectar of fear and sadness gives me more relief then a bottle of Tums.
“Cry and you can go away,
Cry and I won’t make you stay.”
Years ago, as a boy, before the disease, before the decay, before the deterioration and decomposition, Shiggle heard drums and trumpets. They were the sounds of the circus parade heralding the arrival of the Greatest Show on Earth. At the music’s invitation, Shiggles ran away from the dim lights and gray lives of the town where he was born. He ran away with the circus.
“I’m just a sad and lonely clown
Who only wants to see you frown.”
On the road he learned the things he needed to learn. Shiggles dined on satire. He gorged himself on irony. He consumed pratfalls and slapstick and commedia of the soul. He devoured these abilities until they became a part of him.
“Sharp red nose and makeup smears
See my face in all your fears.”
On the road he evolved from an young to a sinister clown. As each town passed the circus caravan, he discovered that in order to make strangers laugh he had to give of himself. Every performance, he gave away something. It was something he required, something he could never get back. Something like dignity, but not quite.
“Noble deeds don’t get me laughs
Disgrace and shame are my true crafts.”
And on the road, due to this charity, he picked up the illness. Somewhere in the crunch of the sawdust, in the stench of the greasepaint, in the laughter and desire of the crowd, Shiggles developed an unnamed woe. A malady of the skull, an infection to assault the head of a jester, in clown lingo: a cranium-in-painium. The inner symptom of this difficulty: boiling corrosion, the outer: unstoppable screams.
“When my skull begins to leak
The sound I make is one long shriek.”
There was only one remedy, one resolution, one release. Outside of his tent, with his appeals for relief in the air, Shiggles found a lost child. Frightened by the night, the toddler’s tears called to him.
“Your tears will stop the horrid pain
That’s stabbing me from in my brain.”
They were ambrosia that tasted of honey, arsenic and lost dreams.
Like joy and terror, comedy and sorrow also hold hands.
Shiggles understood the exchange. Crowds could take what they wanted from him, but he would take what he desired from them. In each town, after every performance, he would procure a therapy: a child to heal him, a child to cry. In the solitude of his tent, surrounded by pillows and scarves and shackles and chains, the child found a new home. And Shiggles found a momentary peace.
“So cry and I won’t make you stay
Just cry and you can go away
To a place where you’ll hear people pray
Because my medicine is your dismay.”
Shiggles would then so leave the life of the circus behind and continue his therapeutic methods in the squared circles of companies crazy enough to hire him.
" I have come to the ring
To continue me terror reign
As these children will sing
While I ravish you with pain."
