Dance With The Snake

To dance with the snake: a fable

By Rino Palmani

Here bleeds the unloved; broken-limbed and baked by a gold-plated sun -
an old man lay dying in a carpark near a bank.

"Remember your Creator in the days of your youth," urged an ancient
king.
He spent his youth waging a relentless war against all things that bore
the mark of Heaven. The road he walked in the second decade of his life
was peppered with the skins of rejected angels. He summoned demons from
bourbon. And with the dark liquid killer running strong in his veins,
he unleashed his rage upon the women who sought ecstasy in the
unchained lust of the beast. After thrusting his seed in their wombs,
he marked them with well aimed-fists. Each blackened eye, each broken
rib were offerings to the altar of his polluted manhood. He loved no
one, and no one loved him in return.

Valuable properties he had none: a lack rectified by the judicious use
of a crowbar, broken locks and wrecked homes to mark his passage. Those
that were weaker than him who stood in his way fell prey to his killing
hand; a serpent tattooed on his right forearm.
"Would you care to dance with a snake?", he would ask them. Their pleas
for mercy became their deathsongs.

"All is vanity," observed an ancient king. He, the once virile and
potent snake, who in his vanity believed that he had strength eternal,
he too, withered with age. Muscles reduced to stringy flesh over
mottled skin. The snake has become a malnourished worm. It is his turn
to become the prey. To taste the sting of the lead pipe, the kisses of
well-aimed fists.

And so there he lay, in a carpark near a bank. Wasted more for pleasure
that for the meagre amount of cash he had on him. Wasted by his own
spiritual kin: serpents in human skins. With a 30- second story on the
evening news for an epithaph. And the people cried out for punishment
for those who shed the blood of helpless old men.

THE END.