The Dancing Lynch Mob. (Prose Poem)

As Carnival celebrations occupied streets around the world this week, a Spanish parade troupe featured Nazis dancing with guns, scantily clad concentration-camp inmates waving Israel’s flag and a float with two crematorium chimneys.

Marisia Iati. Washington Post. 

The dancing lynch mob boogied up to my front yard, pitch forks pumping, torches flaring, and nooses swinging. I heard their music a block away, so I was waiting for them on my front porch.

"What gives?" I asked the crowd in general.

A young man waltzed up to me and said:

"We know you hire illegal immigrants and keep Coronavirus patients in your basement. Plus we have it on good authority that a Coven of Witches is working out of your garage to turn crows into zombies. You gonna hang for that, man!"

I piroueretted down the steps and began a fox trot with a young women who wore a tie-dyed blouse and skirt. She smelled of lemon grass.

"That's ridiculous" I told her, as we went into a frenzied version of the Black Bottom. "Those are all rumors spread by my ex to embarrass me. Nothing more!"

"Not my problem" she replied breezily. "We come to do rough justice to someone -- and it looks like  you're it!"

We formed a line for the Bunny Hop and snaked away to Main Street, where a dance troupe did a postmodern number around a tar barrel and a pile of pillow feathers. I was forced to first jump into the tar barrel and then jump into the pile of feathers. The only reason I escaped with my life was because I began the pas de deux from Swan Lake. The mob liked that so much they all began toe dancing. I fled back to my home, packed a suitcase, kicked the Coronavirus patients out of my basement, and got to the airport for a flight to Marmalade City.

Once there I went to work as a pole dancer under an assumed name -- Dishy Foxy. 

But lately I've been afflicted with St. Vitus' Dance. So I found a local Coven of Witches to cure me by turning me into a crow zombie. 

It's a ridiculous way to live, I must say, but my mother taught me to live righteous and live strong, and don't wear tight fitting clothes, and everything will turn out all right.

I hope she's right, cuz my beak just fell off.