cloWn

colorful              blue                ash           flame-like color

doing tricks        juggles          cries         cradles

carnival              garden           vineyard        graveyard

child                   young girl      old man        I

The grotesquely masked clown, dressed in a wind-blown frock the color of burning flames, cradles me in his arms. I am small, frail and fragile, so I cling myself to him helplessly. I knew he didn’t care with the way he cradles me in this ill-considered haste,yet the weirdest thing is that I can’t feel any danger of being thrown away.

Everything around is wonderful. Dreamlike. I am in a candy colored graveyard, the very eye of this labyrinth father told me to never enter. Orange grass, pink trees, a myriad of fruits that seem to grow on the trees’ trunks (a tree here can have as much as 5 different fruits waiting to be plucked), candy cane tombs, vanilla sky, the labyrinth itself which stood endlessly was made of thick rose bushes and were bedecked with purple blossoms.

Stars seem like they are just a stretch of a hand away. They twinkle before my rocked body. They are nearer here than back home where I still have to draw my head upward to be devoured by their magnificence. But here, I see them descend and I devour them. Here, they are black.

The smell of incence burning permeates me. I can feel its scent enter my nose, slither up my memory. It lulls me even more to sleep, but no, everything here deserves every bit of attention.

The sound of mirth resonates slowly —- playful giggles, innocent chuckles, soft hushed conversations. Maidens came like mists into view, all camped by the glowing grass, sitted, bare-footed and donned in white.

They were my audience.

And then there she* was, the most striking of them all, sitted on her scarlet mount, clothed in purple and scarlet color decked with precious stones and pearls, she that raises a golden cup with her right hand while a smirk creeps upon her plum-tinted lips.

She was happy. Even more jovial, and I know exactly why she felt that way. She had gained triumph again.

* The Whore of Babylon (Revelation 17. 3-4)