To the Editor:
We are the things with feathers. We entered with feathers; only to be plucked, scraped and otherwise stripped of our fluffy down by the participants of the Gooseflesh Nightclub Circus. Our own feathers, stirred by lust, greed and lechery, rose instantly from our chilled skin, vulnerable to violent removal. Ours became a mental landscape of raw dimpled flesh specked with points of blood. We went to the Circus. Profoundly affected by the spectacle, we were filled with a pulsating fear and loathing. A fear of memory and a loathing of an insatiable appetite for the grotesque. Being a brainchild of its producers and actors, the Circus also found its origins in our collective subconscious which screamed audibly and prostituted itself for more. That this experience was orchestrated, saturated in the sweat of labor and a calculated explosion of light, rendered it razor sharp; it was an edge upon which we all wanted to slide and thrash. The Circus is over and we all begin to re-feather ourselves; a vain attempt to conceal our mutilation. Lest we, in this re-poultrization forget our self-inflicted barrage of the absurd, we must continue to expose and appeal to that diabolical smudge on our sanity. We have a chronic thirst. It was quenched recently. We drank the splendor, blood, bile and sweat of the Circus. I write in hopes that we may tip the grail of its legacy and wet our throats repeatedly with this acrid nectar.
Copyright © 1996, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 124, Number 24; May 10, 1996
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